


She Awakens

by rian_johnsons_MOM (OptimusNuva)



Series: Sequelegends (She Does "x") [1]
Category: Star Wars Legends - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Desert, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, Jakku, Languages and Linguistics, Literary References & Allusions, Metafiction, Mild Gore, Novella, Original Character Death(s), Original Character(s), Originally Posted on FanFiction.Net
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-05
Updated: 2020-02-05
Packaged: 2021-02-26 00:41:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 31,998
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21684703
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OptimusNuva/pseuds/rian_johnsons_MOM
Summary: A reimagining of the sequel trilogy with elements of Legends. Two First Order droids are let loose onto the junk world of Jakku, and pursuers are rapidly dispatched; unfortunately for them, one world can be bigger than you think, and its inhabitants tougher.
Series: Sequelegends (She Does "x") [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1568554
Comments: 2
Kudos: 3





	1. Scene 1, Prologue

_"The babies tied in a bundle_

_Warmed over silver flame_

_Mother does anything to keep them warm_

_And loves them all the same"_

_-_ unknown

* * *

...

* * *

_(…Jakku, several miles west of Net Station, circa 30 ABY…)_

Stealing a speeder from the First Order is harder than it appears, as Finn and Poe would agree more readily than most.

It was a clear night, not a cloud overhead, and the light show overhead was simply blissful. If only they could enjoy it. The wind threw sand in their faces, which, thankfully, were masked by First Order troopers' helmets.

"How close are we?" Finn called through his helmet, aiming the question backward at perhaps the best pilot he'd ever known. His partner couldn't answer for some time, as he was so absorbed in trying to navigate _this damned wind_! When his concentration wasn't on the veritable jigsaw map of joysticks and navigation globes this old raft had for a control module, he was imagining what kind of strange things this wind would do to people, and to their machines.

Finally, he replied.

"Telemetry must be wrong, it has us listed as less than three miles from the station. How could anyone live here, man?"

Finn came back with this: "Gotta do what you gotta do, I suppose."

"I suppose."

Neither were the most conversational at a time like this. Both wanted to be; how could they? Make small talk as they'd committed treason and would probably be killed for it—sure, that sounds easy enough!

He fingered the precious cargo in his satchel one more time. All there. Good.

Thankfully, the droids were less picky in terms of talk. Finn tried his luck with them.

"Beebee, can you confirm our location?" The little BB-8 droid did exactly that. A single beep. _Yes_. "Anything you want to add? Two beeps. _Nope_!

Now Finn tried their second astromech-type: CR-13, better known as "Charlie".

"Charlie, anything you'd like to add to your cohort's spiel?"

Now, this droid—a bottle-green update on the old R-models with a confusingly triangular head—was more inclined towards chatter.

_"Allow me to catch y'all up on the many hibbity-jibbities of this little planet, JAKKU-AKKU-AKKu-AKku-Akku-akku… (artificial reverberation) Once a thriving farm planet with an unnaturally strong magnetic—"_

"Wrong kind of conversation, Charlie."

Best to go it stoic, Finn supposed. Poe did it so beautifully, no reason he can't, too. As the lookout at the front of their little skiff, he might as well do some looking.

Under such a unique sky as this, this world could be called beautiful in its own way, he supposed. Even in the sand, an unsettlingly rusty orange with the occasional glint of some scrap. If he looked farther away, towards the horizon…

At least one Star Destroyer was out there, seemingly stabbed facefirst into the ground like a wooden stake. Countless other ships. Some of them old, most of them abandoned.

_"Do you know what they say about Jakku? 'The sand's red because it is where ships bleed,' or something like that."_

Charlie wasn't wrong. This planet would be best served as a graveyard, ship, human or otherwise. No living creature seemed to belong here. They were intruders. But let this intrusion serve its purpose.

Finn seemed to hear the words before his partner said them.

"Uh-oh."

And all at once, they were being chased.

Two First Order ornithopters behind them. Old TIE-style ball cockpits with the rest of the new ship built around them, forming a shape that Finn most quickly equated to Corellian Dragonflies: long in back, held afloat by an array of wings which moved so fast they simply weren't there.

They moved with the roar of one of those Star Destroyers on the horizon. And they had guns. Solid-round.

Finn resorted to the old lower-Caprican expletive as he remembered that last bit. It was muffled by his helmet.

"Frak. Poe?"

"On it. Change of plans."

And so it went: Poe dropped altitude so that their bottom fin scratched the sand. If he remembered his physics, it'd screw up what little visibility they had for those precious few moments. Hard right. Their objective was now on the port side, but there was a canyon drop on starboard.

"Everyone, strap in. Tight." Finn saw the two astromechs take their place at modified side-by-side charging ports, and was picking up their fastening cable before he knew it. He'd also forgotten how tricky walking on a skiff like this could be. He pulled the cable up from the right, pulled it left across the two, and slammed it into its socket on the right side. He himself opted to take the sightseer's seat, made sure both the shoulder and waist belts were fastened tightly. The whole thing took about forty seconds.

The ornithopters were still behind them, seeming to gain. Poe pulled them up on one of the monitors and used his own preferred curse. Time for some trickery. And well-placed countermeasures.

Two idiots with astromechs and a scratch-skiff wouldn't have normally been prepared for eluding First Order ships, but these were _prepared (sort of)_ idiots. You'd be surprised what two idiots can do with some stolen blasters and spare target droids. The light show behind them would rival the view overhead. And then, what about a nice, completely inobtrusive fighter 'chute or two?

And then Poe went down. Forty-five degrees within a second, eighty within two. He might've been chuckling, but Finn couldn't hear him.

Now what was their plan?

Poe must've had some feeling about this place, because they were soon nestled in a mouth on the cliff face, and they were level just as quickly. Finn took his first breath in what felt like ages, and quickly dismounted, leaping to the solid ground. Unfortunately, everything else outside was still hundreds of feet above the ground. Even in the dead of night.

"We don't have long, but I have a plan," Poe called. His helmet was off. "Let's get these droids out of there." Finn was walking back to the skiff and helping to free them already. BB-8 blipped in relief to both of them, as if he was almost as freaked out by heights as Finn was. Charlie immediately started giving them a piece of his CPU.

_"Now listen here, you little ungrateful fleshbags! You can't just turn us upside-down like that and expect no consequences! There will be Khaos to pay, mark my [indecipherable] words!"_

"Get over it, big baby," Poe fired back with. "Whole world outside, if you don't mind walking on air. Be glad to help you right on out. Finn, the chips."

He felt around the satchel one more time. All there. Ready for whatever Poe planned.

"We need to upload both. Do you remember how?" Finn nodded. He popped open BB-8's data panel and plugged in all three chips. Pressed the "record" button like this was some archaic music pirater. Waited for the little orange snowman to give him the AOK to remove the chips one by one. He also added his own little holomessage—for the final cut.

"Universe, you need these. It's… it's complicated, but enclosed in the Net waves are some—"

"Finn, stop it. Either they'll understand or they won't. Besides, we're no Princesses Organa, you know." And with that, Finn terminated the message.

He seemed a bit disappointed, in all honesty. That was what it was. Or maybe just humor in the moment. No time for that. He handed the chips off to Poe, who repeated the process on Charlie in silence. Then words.

"We take them up, let them finish the journey. It's not that far."

"That's not a plan, Poe. That's a gamble. We don't have time for gambles."

"Gambles will have to do, because where one First Order ship is…" He let Finn finish the idea.

"Right. Gamble it is. Even if we'll die anyway."

"Then just be glad Little Baby Beebee over there won't be here to see that." Finn nodded grimly.

And up they went again. They didn't see those 'thopters at first.

The skiff leaned down onto the sand like a ramp, letting both droids just roll right off.

"Go in different directions," Finn told them. "If you stay together, you die together. Go. Now!"

He swore there was hurt in Beebee's eyes.

"We don't have time for this." Poe's voice carried, even without the speakers in a helmet. "Get moving."

With reluctance, they did. BB-8 went left, CR-13 went right.

And the two waited for the Order ships to find them. From there, they would deny having done anything that they'd just done. They would even do what they could against those specialized Interrogators that His Supremacy had trained.

Thankfully, both droids were well out of sight when the First Order patrol ship passed overhead. Its searchlight blocked out every other star in the sky. Even the ship itself, normally an unsettling perfect cube, was completely blocked out by that mini-star.

Finn wasn't happy with that change; he'd just gotten accustomed to the rainbow of turbolasers overhead.

**_"THIS IS PATROLMAN SKORR. OFFICERS FN-2187 AND PO-3675, YOU ARE UNDER ARREST FOR INSUBORDINATION, THEFT AND TREASON OF THE HIGHEST DEGREE AGAINST THE FIRST ORDER! PUT YOUR HANDS UP AND DO NOT RESIST CAPTIVITY!"_ **


	2. Scenes 2 through 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Meet Rey. Meet Thrawn. Meet the Interrogator and the Hunter. See what happens when you stick so many dangerous people on a big world.

Rey had been plotting against her family for weeks when today rolled 'round.

Just like every other day on this miserable world, it was a dry, hot one. Her five "family members" were the same four outcasts they had always been—and for good reason, too. Distrustful, overbearing, disgusting. They weren't even worse than the other junkers they passed on a daily basis—almost exactly the same, in fact. Only difference was, they needed her.

Good. When she pulled this off, they'd be worse off without her.

This morning she'd banged her head against the ceiling of their "yacht". Always a crummy start to a crummy day. Unkar, the oversized blob of jelly and browned leather that he was, had been right there to greet her.

"Get up, girl," he'd said in his typical sub-bass growl, with an accent she'd never placed. Even as a child, she didn't like the idea of learning that accent, one day speaking with it naturally; sometimes she would've rather died. But she'd gotten up with the same swiftness as always. All this had been done before. And she'd learned to put a very unique spin in her words—a drawl of sorts, perhaps.

Wiles, a Not-Kaminoan-But-Similar, was already leaning his head over their fire. A squidlike central arm lifted the ladle to his mouth, and he blew through his nostrils to cool it, then taste-test it. As Rey came abovedecks, she hid the routine shudder as she saw him do that. One of these days, she'd take cooking duties.

"Ah, Rey," Wiles greeted her in a silky voice—once that silk acquired burning levels of static. "It's soup today!" _Just like every day. But how many pisses did it take to get that broth this time? How many ingrown heads did that meat-source have?_

"Glad nothing's changed, Wiles." Hopefully, that was all she would have to say.

Then the Teedos came. That was all they were known as—little, green things hidden behind goggles and oversized cyclesuits, who did not use names and belonged to the Teedo race. Only one was verbal. They must've been out scavenging. Silent Teedo's sack spilled little corroded trinkets on the deck, and more still to the sand some ways below.

Speaking Teedo addressed both Wiles and Rey in a nasally whine that drew from his stomach.

"Soup again. We could always kill the next junker that steals from us, drain his water and add salt until tasty."

"We might 'ave to soon enough," Unkar boomed from behind the NavCon. The pilot's chair disappeared under him. "Eat fast, strap 'er down."

Wiles handed Rey a "bowl" from his left hand—a curiously-dented armor plate. She knew better than to ever try savoring it, simply swallowed the broth and tore at the meat chunks until small enough to gulp down without choking. The whole meal was gone within twenty seconds. Wiles slurped directly from the ladle now in his right hand, and the Teedos had probably feasted on the 'Fruits of the Iron Desert'. Probably followed their own advice.

"You'll want your cyclesuit, Rey. Another wet one," Wiles warned.

"I know," she replied, wanting to put as much bite into the words as possible. Her cyclesuit was in her backpack, her staff leaning safely next to her cot. Neither was in danger, and she'd spite this so-called family for as long as she could by seemingly forgetting those things. They'd never beaten her, never threatened her. Unkar had only pointed out to the great emptiness and told her she could "try 'er luck out there."

She'd never tried her luck. If she went out there, she would die, whether by nature or by… something else, but she'd never once doubted that she would die. But accumulate enough of the right things, and… Yes, she would take her chances when the time came. There might even be something waiting for her somewhere. Just not now, and not here.

She climbed back down the hatch, changed into her cyclesuit, grabbed her staff, and climbed up again. She disabled their anchor and climbed up to the NavCon tower with Unkar. From there, she took her place in the lookout's nest, staff in front of her, stance ready.

The yacht had never been the smoothest ride. Its lev units were prone to uneven spasms, causing lurching, listing, falling, everything in between, and redundancy didn't exist when each of the dozen units were certifiably defective. Wiles and the Teedos manned various stations at altering points on the deck, taking turns leading mumbling dirges in alien keys that made Rey's ears throb.

_'Jakku is where ships bleed.' More like where my ears bleed._

They never encountered much. Maybe some feral scavengers, the odd sand-mutant, occasionally a First Order or an Imperial patrol, depending on the day of the week. In all cases except the latter two, either someone retreats for their life, or they're raided. That was the only order a place like this had, outside Net Station. Rey's eyes drifted over there more than once: a series of gunmetal-grey towers spanning several miles across all three dimensions, a little city populated by alternating parties as territory was lost and gained.

Rey's eyes also went to the Star Destroyers, the Mon Calamari flagships, the whole fields of assorted TIEs. Her earliest memories consisted solely of exploring those for shelter, sliding along their slanted hulls for fun, crashing and being seriously injured more than once, until one time when a certain blob found her and she was too weak to even protest. Remembering that one in particular helped her concentrate on her plans, sometimes.

_She drops into a man-sized puncture hole in the Destroyer's outer hull, scraping her arm and back against its jagged edges and tumbling downward for several meters. A pile of sand from that far up feels like a kick to the whole body—or perhaps it's shallower than she'd ever believed. All at once, there's a fire from her neck down, and then it's gone… and takes all other sensation with it. She can barely breathe. Each gasp is a victory in of itself. She might vomit at least once. A little speck of light wheels in, and then… What's that? It's gone!_

_In its place: a black sphere on two legs. It's breathing. Alive, possibly. She can't remember the last time she's seen one of those. And then it speaks._

_"I think ye're alive. I'd bet ye want to stay that way." The words hadn't made sense, just more unfamiliar babble._

_She was slung over the black sphere's shoulder before she knew it. And that was that. Out into the wind and the sun and the danger. Out into the rest of her life._

She'd mastered capturing that memory while juggling it with the present. Nothing escaped her sights for many miles.

That was how she'd managed to spot… absolutely nothing. A First Order patrol speeder in the morning, a dying Jakkui mutant around noon (put out of its misery with a well-placed bolt of red lightning), an archaic Imperial TIE in the afternoon. Which, to a career scavenging party, translates as: a math-tested sum of zero. 'Zida', to some of the foreign-speakers.

They anchored inside the hangar bay of an Old Republic carrier and disembarked. A couple systematically-arranged chandeliers from the Teedos' morning finds turned the space into a homely place, by the average Jakkui standard. They were lucky no one…

Never mind.

Wiles had climbed down first, stretched his three arms every which way, performing some verbal act like a yawn. It reverberated off every surface it could.

" _For tonight, bri and grona, I believe we've found HOOOOOOOooooooome…"_

Each echo summoned creatures from a different crevice, it seemed. Rey's staff was exactly as she'd always had it, and she lit it up like a double-ended flare. It was some sort of prodding staff, she'd assumed, glowing a savage purple at either end that was both mesmerizing and absolute Hel if you were to touch it. Even from such a distance as this, and combined with the weapons the other scavengers brandished, the yellow-eyed things got the idea.

If only they could've simply stayed in their nests! Instead, they swarmed like some airborne tar pit, choosing flight over paralysis, and at first seeming to charge until they dispersed through each of the many crippling breaches to the carrier's hull. The metal monster seemed to hum, resonating with the sound of those things' wings.

Rey powered her staff down, clipped it to her back.

Unkar was the first to speak.

"See if we've got 'er a good signal from Net." Wiles and the Teedos pulled some apparatus from belowdecks with the aid of some of the lev units, guided it to the ground and began working a puzzle of knobs and circuit patches. Rey admitted that tonight was a good night for such a thing. They hadn't gotten more than a hundred miles from the aforementioned Station.

Thankfully, there was still enough in rations to ensure they would eat tonight and tomorrow morning, and a ways after if they were smart about it. Rey found herself drifting toward the mouth of the hangar, taking in the shape of it and concluding that the ship was now upside-down.

That sky overhead was beautiful. Violent as well, there was no denying that. Even without the flurries of ships and their lasers, stars are awfully violent. From what little she'd gathered, each star was an act of fire held together through its own fury in cold space. And what a great metaphor that was! While just above their own heads, Hel-knows-how-many ships were bickering over this little unwanted world, all because of the Station Speaking Teedo was tinkering with to siphon from.

Somewhere out there, there _had_ to be some ship she could find. Patch together, punch in coordinates, fly off. And where she'd go, she didn't know, and didn't really care. Maybe she'd fire into the battle as a third party, or back to the planet's surface. Maybe she'd strike down Unkar; or catch Wiles' head at such an angle as to set his face on fire. Perhaps she'd cut the invisible cord connecting the Teedos. Maybe the world itself would cease to exist in her wake, she simply didn't know.

Speaking Teedo whooped in celebration, and Rey heard the projector power up. What'd it be tonight? Clone Wars reruns? Outdated Imperial propaganda? Some fizzly splice of the two?

The images were grainy, all-blue, a little blinding at first. Some volume and light adjustments improved the picture.

_Open on a dark-robed figure. Whoever it is, they're long-haired, face not visible. He turns, and the transmitter zooms in on him: ANAKIN SKYWALKER, marked by the scar across one eye, and the hum of a lightsaber in one hand._

_All at once, he's surrounded by wire-thin figures with their joints all at right angles. (Rey still saw a couple droid corpses like that.) The narrator begins dictating events in a throaty old voice._

_"Last night, Anakin Skywalker and his trusted partner, Master Kenobi, led the charge" – some kind of fanfare begins playing – "across the planet of Cato Neimoidia. The entire planet was liberated within hours, with the dreaded Nute Gunray" – transition to something more menacing – "barely escaping with his life."_

_Cut to massive hordes of jewels, furniture, all glittering, even through the flat blue of the holoprojectors. Some ancestor of stormtroopers marches through, blaster in hand, taking a rough inventory._

_"More than twelve-trillion creds in this hall alone," the not-stormtrooper explains._

Rey knew nothing of economy (not even what a credit was), but such an idea of wealth was novel. If that was what the Clone Wars were fought over, then they were all soldiers to this day, fighting conventional wealth through the Scavenger's Economy. No mass-produced cannon fodder, no mystical duo of Masters with their robes and their swords, only… well, who knows what.

Unkar let loose a screeching laugh before this signal cut out. Silent Teedo fiddled with the knobs before finding something a bit more recent, but Rey's investment was already lost. Maybe she'd explore this gigantic ship. There was probably something interesting somewhere.

"I'll be back before morning," she announced once. She didn't care if they could hear her or not, she just started marching towards a set of busted-open ports, staff in hand, and started into the belly of this old beast. As soon as she was immersed fully in the dark, she let impulse guide her.

She hit her nose to a wall within seven steps, cursed one of Wiles' gibberish curses silently, and activated her staff.

* * *

* * *

Poe and Finn were separated as soon as they'd entered the First Order ship. Now they were… elsewhere. For all either knew, they could've passed these rooms hundreds of times before and never recognized them from the inside.

Every surface was a black-and-silver grate. Their chair Poe sat in was completely immobilized; as was he. There was no table, nothing in front of him. He couldn't tell which wall housed the door, or if there even was one. But he knew he wasn't upside-down or sideways based on his sense of balance, so it had to be one of the walls in front or behind him. Even the light sources suggested an unsettling level of symmetry, emanating a blank white light from the center of each wall.

He didn't know how long he waited in there. Whoever came and talked to him, it wouldn't be any amateur. It'd be someone terrifying.

The door opened. The wall behind him. It shut again. He didn't hear his interrogator's footsteps, these walls or their boots must've been designed for creating an apparition. He didn't see a shadow. And he didn't see the intimidation, either. Just a dark-haired guy in First Order uniform, younger than he was. He looked nervous.

Already, there were mixed signals. This big, eerie room isn't meant for such a pushover guy. He had to chuckle. The First Order had, in their typical arrogance and incompetence, sent a rookie against him. His Supremacy must've been swamped in paperwork.

Said Rookie leaned against the wall opposite Poe. He spoke like a kid trying to sound tough, probably had a natural fourteen-year-old voice anywhere outside these walls.

"Where are they?" he asked calmly. Poe burst out laughing as the words escaped Rookie's mouth.

"Listen, kid, I don't know who sent you in here, trying to act tough, but this whole 'interrogator' thing doesn't suit you." He returned to cackling. "What are you, twelve by standard!?"

"Twenty-four, actually." He didn't seem amused. Mostly a little insulted. He was wringing his hands. Gloved. Another big boy scare tactic. He wanted to continue. "Now, wh—"

"Hey, listen, kid, a standard day's twenty-four hours. If a day's twenty-four hours, and a standard year is several hundred of those, and you've been alive for… twenty-four years! I think you need to go back to pre-ed if that's your math!" Rookie just let him get his laughs out. Good thing, too, he felt like he'd burst if he kept that up!

"Kid, I know the First Order seems all _big_ and _scary_ and _all-encompassing_ , but look at you!" He did his own impersonation of the big kid on the playground. " _Look at me, bow to me, I'm so tough, ho-ho, look at me go!_ This whole interrogation is a joke and we both know it, so why don't we skip the formalities and just—" He was cackling again. This whole thing was crazy! And this kid just stands here taking it, wringing his hands like he doesn't want to admit he's wanting to cry inside!

"It's not—" His register jumped, like, six octaves! This kid was a soprano! And it was so. Damned. "FUNNY!" Rookie had said what Poe himself was thinking, how crazy was that?!

And he just kept on laughing. Smiling hurt now, this was rich! The First Order was a joke, he was a joke for thinking they'd send anything less than—

His eyes went wide, but not from amusement. Realization. He struggled to blink. There were tears in his eyes. Not the amused kind anymore.

His immobilized chair was suddenly leaning back. He was staring straight forward to the wall that had previously been above his head. Rookie leaned over him. Smirking. Poe found this new position painful. But he just kept laughing, as if his whole body was pulling rank against his mind.

Rookie's hands were now hovering over him, twisting and fiddling as if Poe's stomach were his marionette. A little assumption had made him even more vulnerable.

Rookie spoke again. The big-kid act had been just that. Poe could still feel that laughter in his chest as the interrogator turned some invisible air-knob, silencing him. How could he breathe right now!?

"You stole from the First Order. We know what. Would you put yourself, your companion and the rest of the galaxy in danger by spreading that knowledge?" The deceptively-mature voice was flat, uncaring, as if he could asphyxiate Poe without a flinch.

He didn't see the Interrogator's mouth moving, but his voice sounded larger than ever:

"Don't say it aloud. Think it. That's all it takes. Think of that map."

And he did. He stopped laughing. Stopped breathing.

And it was like a floodgate had been opened, and he was rushing through. Into blackout…

He'd thought of Charlie. The Interrogator only needed one answer. And he hadn't asked the whole question, either.

Too bad Poe was unable comprehend that victory. Besides, as the age-old saying goes, _there is another…_

* * *

Rey's exploration of this old ship hadn't warranted much so far. Each crackle of her staff echoed infinitely off infinite surfaces, but there were no more yellow-eyed scrounger bats waiting in the dark for her, at least.

She found something like a main bridge: chairs and consoles hung from the ceiling, or had cracked the ceiling/floor she now walked on when they fell. One or two old skeletons with not a hint of flesh on them, reminding her again of the phrase "bone-dry". No uniforms, not even an evident cause of death.

All the ship's guts that could've once been exposed were now mostly stripped from their consoles. This whole thing really was one big skeleton.

She started back down a subtly-twisted corridor, taking careful note of how gravity shifted things to one corner rather than a flat surface, and the whole thing sloped downward for at least a hundred-and-fifty feet. She was reminded again of That One Time, this time continuing the story laid out by her last reverie.

_She'd wanted to kick. To flail. Scream. Bite. Wrestle this deformed blob to the ground and run. But she couldn't even feel how much his bloated arm squeezed into her soft ribs, or how much his shoulder sank under her weight. She couldn't turn her head to see his neck, she only knew that this creature was her enemy._

_Later had come the others: the Creep with the oversized nostrils and directionless eyes, then the One Who Spoke and the One Who Did Not. They had killed. Skinned rats and… larger things, fed them to her until she could feed herself, then tossed a spoon to her and barked the orders. All the while, gloating with all the uses such a child could have: "Climbing into small spaces"; "easier to feed and train than most"; "dependent"._

_Even before she could make meaning of those words, she had some… some distant awareness that they were accurate. But she would grow out of those statements as soon as possible. She'd show them all!_

She slipped. Her arms went up, and there was once a time where this ship would accommodate a slip or two; but not now. She yelled. Dropped her staff, heard it thud against the ground. It went out.

And then she was upright again. The ground beneath her was level. Her boots gripped the durasteel ceiling, crunching a light fixture.

She couldn't remember how far she'd gotten down this way.

Rey knelt to feel for her staff. It was waiting for her on her right side. A little tracing with her thumb guided her to a slider, which got the sparks flying. Good thing, too.

_"Rey…"_ She jumped. Yelled, startled. Who'd said that? Wiles, wasn't it? A clear, high-pitched, echoey voice. This place was perfect for those kinds of things. She heard her own screams being echoed back to her, even now. She wanted to laugh.

She couldn't.

She wanted to get back to the camp. She didn't like it, but almost anywhere seemed safer than right here, right now.

She kept her staff in front of her at full power, carefully retracing her steps back to that hangar. In her confusion, she'd ended up heading to _a_ hangar. Completely empty. Not wanting to stay in this maze any longer, she walked through it. No bats in here, either, thank Hel above and Hevin below.

She would make a break for it. They would chase her. Maybe try to kill her. Not now, when she had no resources (and would've preferred any other humans to this desolation). She'd already sized up some of the larger junk gangs, and security at Net Station…

There was still that feeling, like a fear of the dark—what can lurk in the shadows, just beyond your senses' comprehension? If only she could reach outside her own body, see what was out there…

In a way, she could. She could feel the ships that had once been in this hangar like some distant memory that never was. She could just imagine the battles which had dragged them from this place to their destruction, likely condemned to crash elsewhere in the sand or blown to pieces on the rocks.

And she could feel that sense of dread that had been left behind on the people that would never leave this place. She didn't want to join them, not a chance; Death had called many, many times before.

The wind had this way of echoing around inside the metal chambers of the ship, yet it somehow seemed a completely different story when the sand no longer had a metal corpse beneath it. Her staff lit her entire journey halfway around this gigantic ship.

And it was through that staff she could make out the faint letterings dictating what kind of ship this was: _Acclamator-1173 "Pa'aka"._ Quite an interesting name, that was. She'd seen Acclamators before; from the right angle they resembled Star Destroyers—perhaps they _were_ and she simply couldn't tell from here. She'd had to climb downwards a ways to reach that command bridge, after all.

As she walked around, she recognized the bent nose-end, suggestive of a _very hard hit to the face_ , and some side guns that had been knocked loose like teeth, tumbled to the ground, and had yet to be retrieved. It could've easily been haunted, had she the courage to believe such an unrealistic thing.

Rey heard them before she could see them, but see them she eventually could. Their laughter had stopped, and now they conversed in hushed tones. The HoloNet channel had been turned off. They didn't see her enter, nor did she want them to.

She entered the yacht, wrung the day's water from her cyclesuit, and laid down to try and sleep. Big day tomorrow, whether she knew it or not.

* * *

* * *

When he came to, Poe knew he had to get to Finn. Finn knew he had to get to Poe. Despite their best efforts, the First Order now knew about the droids, who, as you know, were let out into the desert on their own.

Poe's interrogation room wasn't huge, and it didn't have any real distinguishing features. But every once in a while, a Terror Trooper would enter, just to make sure he hadn't a) escaped; or b) committed suicide. So far, he had done neither. And he understood Terror Trooper regulations, as he did the basics of First Order surveillance technology for even high-priority prisoners. What fascinated him, however, was the fact that he hadn't been shot yet.

A different door opened whenever the patrolling Trooper came through: the door to his left, obscured halfway by that same blinding light, but he could still see them distinctly enough against the white room. "Terries", he'd decided he would think of them as from now on. Lumbering black masses of barely-modified Imperial Stormtrooper armor with streaks of red in different spots depending on position and rank. Thankfully, they'd also changed the helmet so as not to be a nerocarbon copy, and their guns were better. Years of petty beatings and indoctrination would not make them any less gullible, however.

"Hey, any drainrooms on this ship?"

"Shut yer yap 'fore I clamp ye." _Friendly enough brill for a Terry!_ Just thinking that sentence made him feel better, if only in the gallows humor way. He grinned defiantly, and the door whined shut again. Inconsistent engineering on some poor architect's part? He didn't doubt it. Even as a loyal Order lackey himself, that problem had been clear.

After the Interrogator, his chair had been uprighted again. He could see everything in front of him, in clear view, was the Terry's red stripe: on the right shoulder. He'd see who it was that came for him next. After Nice Terry left, he closed his eyes and waited for the next one.

The door opened again. Red stripe on left shoulder this time. This bri must've just arrived from boot camp.

"Any news on your partner?" He saw a little start backwards in the trooper's neck, as if he was shocked to hear something he'd had trouble believing was true. You know what they say: 'Boot camp trains you in boot camp only.'

"It's bad, isn't it?" He continued. Patrolmen didn't coordinate with each other, that was too many overlaid waves on one band. Instead, they had a single supervisor. Efficient, but at what cost? "I may be a traitor, but I'm a doctor trained by the Order. I could hear breathing through his helmet, and his speech was slurred. Your rotations pace you at about twelve minutes, right? He has about six to live."

This Terror Trooper must've woken up late today, because he actually fell for that; Poe had trouble believing it could've ever been that easy. The problem now was keeping it up. Even Nicer Terry pressed the Release on his chair, detaching his shackles in one piece but loosening the belt and arm clamps.

"Better hurry, traitor," was all the Terry said.

He did.

* * *

Finn had just started to get a feel for the guards' routes and intervals when one broke the pattern. He spoke at a low volume. He couldn't believe the voice at first.

"I have another Terror uniform stashed outside. Act like a prisoner transfer until we reach it, then say we've been assigned a surprise security sweep." Finn didn't say a word as his shackles came off, nor as he was hustled outside and into a janitor's closet. He chuckled lowly when he saw the two bodies stacked atop the grumpy cleaning droids. He'd been sucked into a Net adventure, hadn't he? If only; this was all too real.

"Are they...?"

"No," Poe replied. He looked at his partner. "But I probably should've."

"But that's not how we agreed to do this!"

"What do you suggest? Look, we could've easily recognized the bri under those masks, but that doesn't change that we betrayed them. We're their enemy now, it's about time they became ours."

He wanted to add _"Look what they've done to one of their own"._ But how much worse could he make this? Still, he saw the man working through it. Even two science officers in their own corner of Order operations received the standard training: the Enemy is simply Another Thing, to be killed as soon as they entered your sights. The First Order is the Only Order.

And two enemies spared would be enough.

"Call them Terries from now on. It helps." Finn nodded solemnly.

Two Terror Troopers marched in almost-perfect sync to the speeder bay, declared their "security-based" need for it, handed their clearances to the superintendent, and took off. With them, they took some extra blasters and Jakkui sandcloth.

Even when they were safely away from the Order base, neither would talk about what they had shared, or how it'd been forced out of them. Both were aware it had happened to each of them, and knew better than to question each other's silence.

Charlie and Beebee were both somewhere out there. No two Terror Troopers in heavy brown coats would arrive in time to find either of them.

* * *

...

* * *

The start of another day for Rey and her detested gang. This time she was on gun duty, and it was drier. Still, the cyclesuit came naturally in the desert.

"Teedos told us there's word of breakthroughs overhead. Expect a mite of crashing in the coming days." Thinking of that, Rey looked up. Yes, some of those lasers did look to be getting stronger. Soon there'd be rumbling: Jakku's first thunderstorm in decades! Red and green and blue turbolasers would eventually cut new scars into this world like holy lightning.

The sun moved from West to East. They passed, oddly enough, a lone Teedo mounting some kind of bantha, it looked like. It was wrestling with something caught in a net. There was yelling.

"There's something metallic in there," Wiles called. "Something round, about torso-sized." That was the signal to she and the Teedos: get ready to jump. She was. Part of the reason Unkar had grabbed her was human agility. No way a pudgy thing like himself could sprint; nor the diminuitive Teedos, nor the wobbly, bendy-legged Wiles. She was their runner.

_And oh, it'd be fun to see_ them _run._

Once the yacht was within fifty feet she slid over the railing and down to the sand. The Teedo drew a stun-blaster as she entered his proximity, but he was a terrible shot. One even bounced off her staff as it sparked to life. She'd heard some who thought that was an omen of good luck. She smiled grimly at the thought. _Thanks for the charm, ugly_.

The Teedo yelled and kicked the bantha-thing, and tugged angrily at the net. Rey heard "Kwak-too ahx-shti smogolo!" (literally: "I'll tear the junk from your genitals!"). It got funnier every time it was used in protest. It kept firing that stun blaster, but to no avail. Her staff went out, smacked it from the Teedo's hand and sent it flying. She brought her staff back around and planted one buzz end directly into the Teedo's stomach. He screamed and went flying in the most cartoonish way possible. The bantha simply became still.

Rey saw the thing struggling in the oversized net: definitely a droid, and one of the most advanced astromechs she'd seen out here. Orange and red all around—and it _was_ round. A big ball with a head. She laughed at this, too. And kept chuckling as the thing resisted her, even as she helped it free from this stupid junk net.

"If you can understand me, I'm trying to get you out of here!" And then: a sweeping _boooop-beep_. 'Oh, sure!' And it was right. She was just going to take it apart, or trade it for something worth something more. Both of them knew this. It surprised her that she'd led with such a futile lie.

The yacht pulled up behind her.

"Rey!" Wiles yelled. "We can handle it once it's safely in our hands!" She knew. But… there was something in the back of her mind, like The Memory Which Never Was. _Take this droid. Run. Now._

Logically, this was neither the time nor the place. Still…

Follow her impulse. Little prods like these were few and far between—they meant something.

"Get the droid to the underdeck, girl," Unkar ordered. "We can discuss trade and stripping later."

"Rey, c'mon!" Speaking Teedo added, urgently.

Her staff was still in her hand. This spherical droid was still stuck in the net. She was fast… and a bantha such as this Teedo's could be even faster. If she took this droid and bolted, there would be no turning back. Take it to the yacht—which loomed just behind her—she would never get a chance like this again.

No guarantee of food, shelter or other such supplies. She couldn't speak droid, only those little inflections. The yacht could easily overtake them if so desired. She had no idea what this droid needed her to do, or where to go.

She had her cyclesuit, her staff, her wits.

Everything else should come later.

The big yacht was swinging around in front of her when she slung the Teedo's net over the bantha. She mounted it with a speed even she found disturbing. Then comforting— _this was meant to be_. A prod to the bantha's flank had it squealing through half-clogged windpipes. That was a sound to hear!

She'd never ridden a bantha before, nor any almost-bantha. But this must've been a match made in Hevin, as it knew exactly what she wanted. And the empty desert before her seemed inviting enough. She charged into it and didn't look back.

* * *

* * *

Charlie, meanwhile, had had better luck—more accurately, immensely bad luck followed by a stroke of good: disoriented and utterly delirious, he'd wandered into Imperial territory.

A figure in the distance became his quarry, and he followed the pacing giant.

At about fifteen feet away, he saw the white vest of a Stormtrooper on the gangly, stick-figure frame of something that was most definitely not human. Fist-sized black eyes glared the sun back into his receptors, and he gave an indication of groaning: a parabolic whirring noise.

" _Spawa gratzo teetongo."_ It was like three distinct bass voices speaking as one. Charlie couldn't find any mouth the sound could've come from. A black blaster suddenly popped into branch-like arms, trained directly at his own pointy dome.

_Translating… Language family: Loirigekic. Native-speaking species: Grey family, currently fighting back First Order invasion fleets in the Loirui systems. Probable language: Sauzigi. Analyzing vocabulary… Sentence translated:_ "State your business, droid [expletive]."

Charlie had some electronic impulse to smile. _Fun! I may be able to shape my oscillator to this language, or something like it. Lots of vowel sounds. Throw in some well-timed clickbeats, we have consonants!_

_"Teerin Da'raki spotzo!"_ The Grey took a step or two back. _"Nokka nooka nokaa kigli!"_ _(Rough translations: "Urgent business, Big Ugly" and "Message for the Empire, you [expletive] [expletive]", respectively.)_ If he were to tik anybody off, he would rather just get it over with.

_"Lo'otzo kaia kigo." (Translation: "Then enter the Empire, droid.")_ Six elbows in the Grey's left arm bent behind his back, unclipping a handheld communicator. He raised it to his mouth and began dictating in some language other than his native tongue. Probably cipher. Charlie couldn't understand it. There was chatter back and forth, intonations of the speakers' voices rising and falling in some way that could've been considered musical.

They waited for several moments. He twisted his head round and round (and triangular) in some festive fashion, much to the Grey's bitter amusement. Six minutes had passed when the speeder arrived: a little, silver, worn-down thing manned by two gunners (Pau'an and Twi'lek, looked like) and no apparent driver. The only indication of its official military use was the hexagonal Empire insignia stamped in nerocarbon onto its glaring frame.

Charlie decided to greet them in Basic Droid, also known as Binary. He didn't like the term 'Droidspeak.' Made him feel lesser, like he was just a piece of disposable hardware when in fact he was a _living_ (sort of), _breathing_ (not at all) _, creature_ (droids are not animals)!

_"Well, helloo-o-o-o-o transport!_ _I'm CR-13, and I'm here to help you defeat the First Order!"_ In its strictest sense, that was a lie. But it didn't go against his protocols for two reasons: a) his subroutines permitted deception to enemies of the First Order; b) depending on how they used the information, they could very easily defeat them. Still, that's not what Poe and Finn entrusted him with that information for. He had some rough idea what it was about.

A ramp unfolded from the siding of the speeder, and he twirled his head one last time to the Grey. Should he tell the scout some anecdotes about his egg-bearer? He decided against it. He rolled up the ramp and came to rest between the two gunners. The ramp retracted silently.

And the new trio sped into the unknown. For Charlie, at least.

* * *

They approached what looked like a crashed ship—one of many. Charlie had to think of one Holoplay, in which a Jakku-like world is run entirely by feral warlords with armies living in the bodies of old ships. But the Empire were no Immortal Joles, as far as he knew.

There were a few sentries pacing around outside, looked like normal junkers. Far enough apart that they could've each been defending their own territories. It was a big ship, after all: a piece of an old Star Destroyer, crashed and reshaped by time into a jutting tower—a junk castle.

From behind the legs of the Pau'an, he saw one junker's head come up in a subtle nod. There seemed to be some kind of grey cap hidden under thick black hair. A massive animal prod jutted towards them, then towards the Star Destroyer. No one said a word.

They kept getting closer. He attempted radiation scans up and down the spectrum, came up with nothing. They were within five-hundred feet of it. Four-hundred. No breakaway. Two-hundred.

_If this is the end, let's hope Beebee had better luck_. That was his only thought. He didn't care if he was destroyed. Just a piece of disposable hardware, after all.

Much to his thanks, he didn't. Some blast doors must've opened, or some hologram hidden a secret doorway, because now they were _zhoom_ ing through some pitch-black tunnel to which there seemed to be no end. He picked up sounds like the wind. The Twi'lek's loose robes flapped over his optics randomly, obscuring his vision.

They slowed to a halt, and his optics took in a whole new world of new wrapped in some sort of comparability to old data: grey-and-black walls in the usual utilitarian grid patterns, but the lighting here was dynamic: colors beyond featureless white—blue, purple, red. And there were paintings, some of which he recognized from First Order databanks as the Blasphemous Epics. It was a rectangular room, fifty-by-[unknown]-by-[unquantified]. Not what he would associate with the interior of an old capital ship made vertical.

His head was spinning trying to take all this in. _So this is our greatest enemy. There is an obvious point of divergence, but they share… traces._

They disembarked from the speeder. He rolled himself down the ramp, and two fully-armored Stormtroopers (one too tall to be human, the other too thick) made the Gesture of Ordering to him: two fingers pointed towards Charlie, thumb pointing upwards first at themselves, then each other. He'd half-expected not to understand, yet he did. They even confirmed it in Basic-Verbic:

"Follow us, droid," Thick Stormtrooper told him. He _beep-boople_ d acknowledgement, and they began walking. He couldn't see the end of this [room of unspecified function, perhaps hangar bay], but he eventually would. Were he some weakling human, his supply of chemical endurance would've been long-depleted. But he measured the distance as he went: seven-hundred meters. He rotated his dome to take the whole place in: a hodgepodge of ships—all makes and models—scattered in some mathematical formation across the entirety of this room, each tended to by at least one nonhuman sharing an article of grey or white. Some had badges marked by several columns of colored cubes, some wore Imperial caps, at least one had just tattooed the Imperial insignia directly onto his own body!

It was fascinating; he wanted to learn more.

Finally, they reached the end, where a single (curved) door opened counterclockwise to greet them, barely wide enough that two people could walk through at once. Tall followed Thick, and Charlie followed Tall. They crowded into a small space and he rotated in time to see the door spin shut behind them. They didn't press any controls that he could see, yet they went _up and up and up and up…!_

And then they stopped. He counted seven seconds until the door opened again: clockwise, opposite the direction it had opened in the first time. What change had been made between levels? He hadn't felt any disturbance in their smooth ascent upward for [undefined] feet.

"This is your stop, astromech," Tall told him. Charlie wobbled his whole centerframe forward and backwards in a nod to the Stormtrooper. Then a little _whrrrreep-whroop ("Goodbye, boys!")_ and he rolled forward.

The surface made a different sound under his wheels: a kind of zipping noise. This, too, was [undefined in all dimensions]. He saw statues, each depicting a different time period: Pre-Republic, Old Republic, the Jedi Era, the Palpatine years. The images were far more detailed than any hologram could ever hope to be. Lightsabers clashed. Blasters flowed into assailants that were out of frame. Grand leaders in large robes, hands curled upward to the sky.

The voice he heard came from [undetermined source; obscured by reverberation].

"I've been told of you, astromech. State your designation to me." He analyzed the voice: a mid-range baritone in its prime, now deepened into that bass voice that comes to some in later life. [Species unspecified, possibly human].

He did as he was told, reciting " _CR-13"_ in Basic Droid. Then, remembering the manners Finn had once tried to teach him, he added: _"And you are, sir?"_

Footsteps. In front of him. From the shadows emerged a tall figure in a pristine cloth Imperial uniform. His badge of rectangles was longer and more heterochromatic than most he'd seen already. Blue skin, hair (mostly) jet-black, red eyes. He tried reading the lines in the [species: most likely Chiss] face.

"You may call me Thrawn, if you like. Would you prefer if I spoke in your native tongue?"

_"Why, sure, sir!"_

The Chiss—Thrawn—reached into a pocket and pulled out some sort of palm-sized tyn, opened it, and pulled out a small gadget: a black rectangular device outfitted with two large buttons on one side, and an array of blinking lights on the largest surface. Thrawn placed the buttons beneath his pointer and middle fingers, and began pressing down like some musician playing an instrument. Charlie heard the beeps: Basic Droid!

_"Are you receiving this, CR-13?"_

_"Yes, indeed, sir."_

_"Polite. Now, may you tell me this information regarding the First Order, please?"_

_"Yes, sir. Or, rather, I can show it to you."_

_"But what can you tell me without simply showing me?"_

Charlie had to think on that for a moment, recalling everything Poe and Finn—and others—had said. And he dictated his memories for the Chiss.

_"…System… First Order fortress. Galen Marek, codename: Starkiller. His late lover, Juno. …The worlds between them… Potential defense measure… corroborated by local legends. Singularity… Dangerous place, indeed. Snippets, you understand."_

Pause.

_"I believe I do. Now, what were you planning on doing with this information before coming to us?"_

_"We were heading to Net Station before I was forced to dismount."_ He didn't mention Beebee, just hoped he'd had better luck. That idiot certainly could. Besides, they wouldn't die together, now would they? _"The information was copied into me and I was told to reach Net Station in the hope that it could be transmitted throughout the galaxy on the waves. Or I could've gone straight to the source, which indeed it seems I have, good sir."_

_"It seems you certainly have. This will require some consultation, some deliberation. Be ready for anything, CR-13—do you have another name you would like to go by?"_

_"Nope, sir."_

_"Alright. Order: end conversation."_ The droid did as he was told, and Thrawn placed the device back in its tyn, sliding it into some pocket Charlie could not detect.

Tall and Thick returned from the turbolift and escorted him away. At the very least someone had listened.

* * *

Thrawn consulted one of his advisors overseeing the Jakku campaign: a female Zabrak named Tore. She stood leaned against the wall in her grey Imperial uniform, pretending to read reports from other sectors. She already knew what they all said.

"Did you hear that?" Thrawn asked her, began walking towards her.

"Every word, Commander."

"And what did you sense?"

"Same thing you did: that droid doesn't even know what it's carrying."

"But was it a trap?" Tore approached the question logically, with a bit of that intuition Thrawn encouraged. She raised her orange eyes to his reds.

"Not even the First Order would use this as a trap: it relies on too much of a stretch in our judgement. If it is a trap, they're even dumber than we thought they were."

"And if we are to examine him for this message he carries, what then? That map, and that system he mentioned—we could see if his findings match our own."

"We certainly could. But that wouldn't prove anything. That detail about the Mareks was a strange one; they helped form the Rebel Alliance, after all. Even for a breakaway of purists, it's odd. Yet… I can't help wondering if what it told us _was_ the truth."

"He can be searched—right now, if necessary. All it takes is a single signal down to Diagnostics. This is why I chose you as an advisor: every once in a while comes a situation where one's judgements may be found… senile. And you come in and correct the old man." The sinister message was clear.

"I'm well aware, old man," Tore responded humorously. Thrawn let out a single, isolated chuckle.

"Send out the order: the droid is to have his entire databank copied into our archives, and then released out into the desert. If he's not found by the First Order first, he'll be sent to scrap by the locals, which would be best."

He started walking away, then added, with a little turn of his head to face the Zabrak:

"But I've followed the wrong advice before."

He couldn't trust his advisors, especially not for this. For all he knew, they were the ones who'd produced the droid. And if they were conspiring with the First Order…

No, that was unthinkable. No xenophobe would ever align with the Empire ever again. Especially not after _him_. They would try to usurp power, yes, but never with the First Order. They could produce a star chart with a long history of folklore, imprint it with false information, hand it to him, lead him and his entire Empire into a trap. From there, new leadership.

Maybe he really _was_ getting paranoid in his old age. And if he was, what would a major loss due to a lapse of judgment prove except exactly that?

* * *

* * *

The prisoners were loose, and that was bad—in fact, not just bad, but horrible. That's two droids and two traitors slipped from their grasp. Phasma took this hard.

And it had been taken particularly hard by the two guards who'd been subdued, who unfortunately were left alive only to be put in front of three-man firing squads and polka-dotted with blaster holes the size of small coins.

And the Interrogator, who had done his laughing trick on Poe, was found in his quarters with his unlit lightsaber in hand. Reports of noises from that room had sent her and two guards down there, and they'd found the Ren in a sitting position, levitating over his bed, ancient weapon clasped between two hands' worth of ungloved fingers; the scream did not seem to come from his mouth, but rather the world around him all at once. And then it was muted—not ceased, but muted. Damned Force users! Too unstable, all of them! There were ember slash marks on the walls to his left and right, horizontal to diagonal to vertical.

Still…

"Kylo Ren," Phasma enunciated. "You are requested for counsel with the Inner Spires." He mouthed the words in sync with her. She cringed. "Now." He muttered that, too.

Good thing the bed was beneath him, because the Knight dropped like a meteor from the Belt. His eyes opened for the first time, and he examined the Terror Captain with a muted fury. He spoke flatly, quickly, beyond matter-of-fact into an almost mocking deadpan.

"I will be there within four minutes. You may go now." Phasma scoffed blatantly. Her blaster was ready, any minute now…

No. He was First Order, too. Directly under His Supremacy. The Inner Spires of the First Order emblem.

That could come later.

* * *

The Knight of Ren trudged to the HoloCourt in full uniform—gravity-black _jorongo_ over crimson mail armor, black hood thrown back to put the silver mask on full display. Not that there was much to see, aside from the diamond-shaped mouthplate (again, black) and concentric infinity-shaped eyebands. Abstracts, some thought, were some of the most terrifying images of all. His lightsaber hung emitter-down from the left-hand side, hidden entirely by the wide _jorongo_. Still, black gloves could reach the weapon faster than even some Mandalorians could draw pistols.

Down several halls. Past at least one floor-to-ceiling window of the rusty Helworld outside. Terror Troopers in silver, black and red stepped aside for Kylo. Good. Each one resembled some ancestor staring back at him, judging his every action. Let them be.

One corridor was completely empty, given life only by the distant hum of generators and the soft thuds of his footfalls. Only one door: the other end. He walked with determination, with a bit of swagger unseen by anyone. A heavy door lifted itself before him without so much as a squeak, and into the darkness beyond he walked.

Kylo Ren emerged into a shadowy chamber and immediately felt the weight of the presence within. Shadows everywhere. It was almost as if he could feel each speck of dust landing on his helmet.

Each action has an equal reaction: every sound reverberated infinitely, became fundamentally _darker. Heavier._

"Kylo Ren."

And it was broken. By the flat, compressed noise of a General's snobbish whine, topped off by a Coreworlds accent. He turned to his right, seeing the outline of Hux's long coat like a thicker kind of darkness, something with depth, something with form. He was stiff, same as always.

"General Hux." Through the mask, his voice became mechanized, muffled ever so slightly. Didn't mean it gained any expressiveness.

And then, to his left:

"Brothers." That voice, too, was muffled—but not in the mechanical way, more like speaking through a piece of cloth, or a door. Kylo saw the animal mask of a fellow Knight, Serbris. Same _jorongo_. He saw the holsters dangling past the man's knees, confirming the identification.

"Brother." As was the mutual greeting of the Knights of Ren. They were all present, in body and spirit. More Knights, still, were indisposed across the galaxy. First Order business.

And then the giant came. First, the shape of a blue rectangle fizzled, crackled into being in front of them, several times their height. It slowly materialized into a throne of greyed rock, withered, eroded, but still whole. Through the Net came the accompanying being: an equally-withered cadaverous giant. The trio saw the head first: a shrunken, collapsed lump of charred flesh and deformed skull shape. Half its jaw was missing. Humanoid eyes sunk back forever into oversized sockets. A dimple in the thing's forehead deepened into an old head wound.

Hux knelt first. Kylo and Serbris followed.

The cadaver spoke. Not even this whole cavern could carry the voice any more than its own speaker.

"My Sons: Hux, Kylo, Serbris." It was ragged. Old. Centuries, at least. At most… who knows? None of the kneeling members of the Inner Spires, for one. Its power was still evident; His Supremacy Snoke of the First Order of Ren addressed them. This situation had reached all the way up to him. He spoke slowly, like speaking through his last breaths.

"It has come to my attention that there are traitors on Jakku. They were allowed, through lack of security, to steal two droids and various confidential data regarding the Order. They were captured. They escaped before they could be executed. And what has been done about it?"

Hux went first.

"My Supremacy, you have my assurance that—"

"Promises! Lies lying in wait!" It was a hoarse growl, like vocal chords tearing themselves apart. And then His Supremacy was silent. Serbris spoke next.

"We head out into the desert to find them ourselves," he suggested. Note how it wasn't stated as a suggestion or a promise, but a true _statement_. Not once did their leader's body or face so much as twitch.

"Good, good. Serbris, Kylo, you will go; take Phasma and some Troopers. Hux, you will oversee continuing operations here." Kylo looked again to his right and was satisfied that the General looked completely indignant.

He thought about what could happen—and had happened before: the old corpse could lean forward, make his apparition projection palpable, even solid, brush a figure aside—in this case, Hux. Snoke could transcend the solid state and simply reach out through the Force, inflicting pain through spasms, convulsions, or the simple implantation of the _thought_ of pain. He could order the Ren to turn on the General; oh, Kylo would've savored every moment of that.

None of that happened. The gigantic cadaver remained still. Only the twisted remains of lips indicated any sign of life.

"You will do as you have resolved to. This is all, my Sons."

And the apparition fizzled out, massive throne and all, into fireless blue sparks and was gone, as if he'd never been there.

All three of them stood up. Serbris turned to Kylo; Kylo turned to Serbris. Hux dropped the attentive kneeling stance and exited silently.

"Get Phasma, bring the 223rd, have them spread out orbiting Net Station." Serbris ordered. Kylo took the information in without reaction. Then, the hunter added this:

"Anything else will be needed up top soon enough."

Kylo could not agree more. Already, the battle overhead was becoming visible in the daytime sky.

* * *

* * *

The bantha-thing did not exhaust itself until long after the yacht had stopped its pursuit. Must not have been as fast as she'd remembered.

At first, its galloping pace had adopted a new rhythm, something choppy but still consistent. Its breathing had changed, becoming shallow but constant, circular. Then its pace had slowed. Each footfall soon became its own lurch, like the creature was putting all its weight into each step.

Finally, it had slowed to a casual trot. Rey would not push the animal further. She didn't see any sort of cyclesuit on it, which made that feeling of moisture under her fingers all the more unsettling. This creature was dependent on others for its water. This realization hit Rey like a slap to the face…

And then faded into dull acceptance. If that was how it was, then that was how it would be. She dismounted, permitting the mount to halt, and finally took the time to untangle the droid. She thought she heard some protesting sounds, like pouting.

"Shut up, I'm trying to work you loose. Hold still!" Reluctantly, the thing obeyed. Now with some jagged chunk of metal from the Teedo's bootpouch, she sliced piece-by-piece through the heavy netting and eventually freed the little ball with a head.

Only once that was done did she examine their location: barren, even by Jakkui standards. Not a ship larger than half a speeder to be seen until the horizon in heavy directions. And on the horizon… A red-and-green rainbow. That had been going on for some time; now it was larger than ever. As she'd thought many times before, t'would've been beautiful if she didn't know what those were: fire in the void exchanged between floating cities. She didn't really know nor care who shot at who, just that it put on a good light show.

Then she turned back to her droid—not hers, but she was its charge. And the bantha-thing panted in place. She walked in front of its face, trying to find where its eyes would be. Oddly, they were where she thought its nostrils should've been placed. Its mouth was somewhere below that, oddly human: lips, little tendrils of brown hair forming a kind of beard. It seemed to be smirking at her. Its eyes were a kind of blue, but all-blue, like the stories she'd heard of the Free Araken Spicers.

"You're on your own." And with that, she began walking away. The creature would not make a sound again, not for all its hours. She pulled her goggles to her eyes, unfolded her hood, double-checked that her staff was fastened to her back.

"You too, if you don't follow me." And so the little orange-and-white droid followed her. It chirped a little.

"That reminds me… I can't understand you. We need to develop some way of communicating. Can you understand me?"

_"Mreep-woo."_

"That's a yes?"

_"Mwro."_

"No?"

_"Biddleep."_

"I can't understand you!" Then, she started thinking back. Sometimes she'd see a rhythmic flashing of lights on the horizon, most likely junkers communicating over long distances. She'd never seen any of her "family" use it, but it shouldn't be too hard to build a language from scratch.

"Let's… Let's start with something simple: yes and no. Can you beep once?" The droid did. "That'll be 'yes'. Can you beep twice?" It did. "That's no. Do you understand?" One beep.

"Now," she continued. "I am Rey. What will Rey be? Three beeps?" One beep. "Good. Beep three times if you need something. What can I call _you_?"

A beep. A second beep, descending in pitch, neither cutting off but fading out, imitating a vowel ending rather than a sharp consonant: _Bee Bee!_

"Bee Bee?" One beep. "Bee Bee it is. Are we still headed in the right direction?" Beep. "How sure are you?"

_Mmmm… Bleepidoo-bwamp._

"Not absolutely certain, then?" Beep. Great.

"How many are after you." Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beepbeep. Beepbeepbeepbeepbeep _bloop_ beepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeppbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeep.

"A lot," Rey concluded. It wasn't a question, but the droid confirmed with one final _beep_. And then was silent again.

She felt for her electrostaff one more time. The trigger was exactly where she wanted it. Judging by the position of their _Sta_ Hel, they had some five hours of daylight out, and they didn't want to be long out after nightfall, even under the atmospheric light show. Bad things…

* * *

They walked for ten minutes. Twenty. Thirty. Rey estimated the horizon was still at… well, the horizon. And this Bee Bee only seemed to confirm that they were, more or less, headed true. She'd concern herself with gritty details later. A droid as advanced as this hadn't come to this world, especially not willingly.

Fifty minutes. Seventy. Hel was drooping now. Still, the wreckage around them was now gathering form. She thought she saw an old Z-model fighter, one she'd heard once called "Headhunter". Both its wings had torn free in glorious black flames, and its frame was stripped down to wire. The cockpit's panes remained bitten into the thing's… what was that part again? Canopy? Perhaps.

Eighty. Talk was scarce, she had no problem with that. Droids weren't good conversation, anyway. That, and it was much more convenient when her face was covered to remain moose.

Hundred-with-five minutes now. Not even halfway to Heldown. She didn't know if the droid needed rest or fuel or what. As for herself, the cyclesuit she'd taken some years ago continued to do its titular job, leading through a tube into a little slit poked in her hood. Such a design hadn't been an original idea—the aforementioned Spicers had made it popular, 'parently. She wiped her goggles several times, each with long intervals in between.

And so it continued. Hundred-twenty minutes. They stopped once, in the overturned belly of some other starfighter Rey couldn't recognize. Little Bee Bee must not've been familiar with it, either. Whatever it was, it kept the breeze mostly out, which was good. The droid sounded a little baked, although she had no idea how she could've guessed at that. They rested about half an hour, then continued onward, a bit more sluggishly than before.

Their time didn't look the best. Bee Bee kept insisting they had a farther ways to go yet, which Rey could believe. Jakku was a whole world, as some had been apt to forget at times. Still, no encounters with junkers or scavengers of any sort. At all. That must've been quite something. She wondered, distantly, if she'd suddenly see the corpses of the whole world's population spread out across the dunes, Helbathing on the hulls of capitalships, some with arms outstretched to the Hevins and refusing to die.

Maybe, she thought. Unkar and Wiles and the Teedos would be among them. And that bantha-thing from before.

Then, in her abandoning reverie, she saw something else: a… face? A smiling face. A Mother's face. Her Mother's face. Indeed, her Mother must be out there somewhere, although she'd never much thought about it.

"Do you have a mother?" She didn't realize it'd been a question for Bee Bee until it came out as exactly that.

_Beep… beep._

"Too bad. She might just have taught you not to lead any unassuming _bri_ or _groné_ into the desert without chance of survival…"

And then there was something ahead. In Jakkui culture, anything that approaches is to be fought. No exceptions, as you've probably already guessed.

"Much less reaching their destination."

Her electrostaff came out already blazing. Without any real explanation, she was glad there wasn't a ribbon in the sky which shared its color.


	3. Scenes 10 Through 18

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> MORE stuff happens on the junkworld of JAKKU-aKKU-akKU-akkU-akku...

Charlie was released into the desert with three hours to Heldown. Tall and Thick essentially saw him to the projected doorway, then became immobile as if crossing out of this fortress' shadow would inject lightning into their necks. He saw this and immediately understood. No further help from the Empire. He rolled himself out, whistling each a _"Goodbye, dear friends, and [expletive] you too"_ as he did.

Over the next few miles he passed several lone junkers—impossible not to recognize them as the Stormtroopers they were. Little flecks of white blaster armor peeked out from stoles, jorongos, ponchos, heavy robes and everything in between. And each one's face bore the scowl of a Stormtrooper's mask. They squinted cautiously at him, let him pass without the slightest of sympathy.

And once they were gone, he was forced to analyze his surroundings—he probably would not have wanted to if he'd had a choice, but each little pattern in the sand or the wreckage told a whole story his programming dictated _would not be closed to him_. He was even assembling models of what angles the ships had crashed at, how many crewmen were aboard, how much had been stripped from their frames. Looking in particular at that last model, he realized just how badly the Empire wanted him to die out here. 'Twas the way of the world, after all.

Then he turned his sensors to the sky: all parties involved had at least the power to wipe out this system—capital ships, hundreds of fighter squadrons, frigates, carriers, everything in between. As he walked in [undefined] for the next few minutes, he witnessed the tide of the battle change dozens of times, often with swift one-twos where the First Order would gain the upper hand over the aliens, hold victory in their palms long enough for even a stray Clawcraft to snatch or smack it free. Fresh ships arrived as quickly as they fell dead in the sky, or rained their remains over other ships. Charlie estimated that little to none of it would fall to Jakku below unless some dynamic change in formations would come about.

He measured their turbolasers: red, green, blue, pure white; from the thickness of the wires running through his frame at this very moment, up to beams which could punch craters the size of whole starfighters in anything they touched from hundreds of miles away.

Analyzing the ships brought something which, had he been programmed with Passion in mind, would have caused panic: the First Order and Fel Empire were using some of the same ships, and he documented the confusion this might have caused to a naked eye. And he saw the New Republic up there, too, with their ARC-220s and L-wings and MonCal carriers—Scumships, the Order affectionately called them. All of this for the station below, all of them shoving each other out of the way and as such creating an indestructible stalemate.

Droids may not get distracted in the traditional sense, but they may become focused, diverting processing power from sensory to analytics long enough to lose awareness of their surroundings. In the olden days, less-advanced droids would stop in place as a safety measure, but now subroutines could roll a CR-model Pyramidic Astromech over miles upon miles upon miles of sand and loose metal without registering any of the information they processed.

Three speeders and a barge approached from the _Noulr'est_. He was still documenting how fast First Order TIEs must've had to move and comparing those numbers to his own archives when they brushed within fifty yards of him. Long-range scopes came out, nets and sharpoons were readied. One speeder went ahead of the rest, just to make sure there was actually something here. By the time Charlie heard the roaring and gusts of things kicked up, his triangular head was spinning in what a meatbag would've called "startlement".

It was big, rectangular, topheavy but with the speed of many a mounted animal. Its rider was almost entirely obscured by the heavy front armor, and the grille which stretched over even that.

_Oh, [expletive], is there anything around here that I could use? Any defenses? Playing "dead"? If I do that, would they strip me for parts while I'm still "alive"?_

_Can't wait to find out. "Joy", as it's been said._

He stilled himself completely, straightening up and raising his central gear, but kept the red dot on each headface blinking at a slightly different rate.

Still, nothing could've prepared him for what the speeder did:

It decelerated ever so subtly, then swung its heavy frame in a semicircle in front of Charlie. The rider—almost humanoid, save the tail, leaned over towards the paralyzed astromech, bared three rows of needled teeth towards him, then slammed a button on his control console. Charlie saw it all. A forked tongue spat incomprehensible noises into the comm device, then punched it with force in equal measure, deactivating it. Already, he was anticipating, examining various possibilities; needless to say, none had any positive outlook whatsoever.

Two other speeders arrived, then the big barge. The thing had the sound of some predatory animal which frightens its prey into immobility, then charges and tears them limb from limb with a grin in its jaws. Charlie did exactly as the prey would have done, and hoped (as much as a droid can hope) doing so deliberately would yield some differing result.

He counted the creatures on the barge: six of them, each seemingly bigger than the last, dusty and bruised, most likely all heavily deformed. Two were stationed at… _Krii'kii! (Translation: [undefined] [expletive])_. _Those were sharpoon launchers! Big ones._

They buzzed with blue-hot static, as sharpoons do. The effect seemed to expose the interior of each cannon's barrel as they approached. Each was loaded with dozens of scatterbound projectiles—things capable of impaling a battle droid from hundreds of meters away. He was reminded that humans had a tendency to squint when they're about to experience pain, to pucker their whole bodies. He'd seen it many times, and had concluded each time that it hurt the human more than he could know.

Still… If he died, that'd be unimportant in the end.

They fired, scattering. Only one sharpoon was all it took, riffling through his outer torso and grazing at least four servomotors on his left side. He spasmed uncontrollably as burning bolts of lightning shot through him, threatening to—!

* * *

The thing which approached them was nothing Rey had not seen before: other junkers. These were two tall figures on cobble speederbikes, bearing large lances and junk pouches which rattled almost as loud as their massive turbine bodies. Her staff was at the ready. Bee Bee took his place behind her, _wheepl_ ing anxiously. She pulled down her bandanna for ease of speaking. She felt the air against now-exposed skin to be almost frigid, although that illusion would fade quickly.

"Can you fight?" One beep. Two rapid ones. One. Two. Great—a droid capable of _under_ estimating itself. Regardless, she readied her staff.

Then…

It was so crazy, it just might work.

She powered the staff off. It fizzled, shrank and was gone.

The two speeders continued to approach; she saw now that one was a good bit larger than the other. The rider of that larger speeder was, as logic and visibility would have it, the larger of the two, much larger. She could see the bulges of the creature's arms even from… what was the range? A hundred feet? Something like that.

"Go along with it," she told the little ball droid. Then, for resonance: "Go along."

They approached (eighty), now adopting some kind of two-bri formation she'd seen executed before, the two speeders weaving in and out of each other's paths in something like unison. Together, they were wobbly, erratic (fifty). Their oversized turbines whined like long-abused animals, and their legs dangled over them (thirty). Rey wanted to smirk, finding that to be an accident waiting to happen.

She made sure to steel herself as much as possible, almost as if she neither knew nor cared that they approached. The larger stopped his cobble some eight feet from where she stood. His oversized lance, it turned out, was the shorter of the two, as the smaller rider's reached almost to the same point—a foot from her sternum—from a parking spot several feet behind his larger companion. She didn't know much of biology, but this all seemed like some erotic Holo her "family" had once tuned into, as she watched in adolescent horror and fascination. She hoped not, that wouldn't be good for any involved. Not her, not them, definitely not Bee Bee.

"Hah," she greeted. The larger rider, a stern ogir-thing with protruding bottom tusks and a chop of hair on either side of its head, growled with some in-character quality she couldn't quite name.

"Hah yerself," replied the shorter one in a monotone unlike any she'd ever experienced before. Rodian, maybe? The eyes were off, though—more humanoid than anything. Neither rider moved from their speeder, nor lowered their lance. She examined the long weapons and saw they were just regular ol' poles, no energy gimmicks or hidden projectiles anywhere. Not even sharpened to a point, although that wouldn't matter at terminal velocity.

And neither rider said anything else. That worried her. They never took their eyes off her, either. That worried her, too. Not everyone (or thing) on Jakku spent every waking second subsisting on scrounged junk. Some were just mean, others yet…

_Don't go for your staff. Not yet._

"Passing through?" She asked them.

"Passing through," the smaller rider replied. Something was off. Why weren't they moving!?

"Have you heard anything about overhead?" No response. She added: "The sky." The big one looked up. The smaller one never moved, never blinked. She swore the sand rustling under their feet was louder than either rider! The sun seemed to tickle and tease at her now-exposed face. Burning precious moisture from her pores. But… the bandanna was never part of her cyclesuit, it was merely just a bandanna. Just like these two riders' lances were merely blunt instruments, and these two themselves were merely passing through.

Then:

"We hear there's three parties up _there_ ," said the larger one. Deeper, darker than even Unkar's tones, and a lower register. With a pointer finger easily the size of her fist, he pointed to the sky. Childlike, Rey followed the motion and still saw some faint strings at this hour, almost heard the cannon reports. "There's the Empire, the First Order, and now the New Republic."

"None can gain an inch on one another," the smaller one replied. "As long as they continue as is, they are locked, but will not concede any even to gain. And new ships will refresh the old, over and over and over and over and over until-l-l-l…" His whole body faded downward and to one side, perpetuating the scene depicted until Infinity, somewhere at the bottom of whatever hole he mimed falling into.

Rey glanced rapidly between the two, taking in this information with a grain of sand. And what did it mean, besides, except what she already knew?

"And you two are just passing through?" Both nodded separately.

"Indeed. Knock down any First Order checkpoint you can, avoid if you can't," the smaller one advised. What? "They're searching for… something, no one knows what. If you have it, we'd be glad fer you to keep it away."

Still, even as he offered these words, his lance never once moved. Now, Rey realized, she would've been even more concerned if it had.

"Best travelin' to ye," the larger rider finalized, then the turbine he was mounted upon flared to life again, spinning so rapidly it first appeared to move one way, then slower in the opposite direction… and then in its original direction at an even slower rate. With a little yank at his left handlebar, the other rider revived his own speeder as well. For a moment, Rey saw under his thick brown sleeve…

Revealing a little spot of white armor. She smirked with some level of relief.

They turned and were off. She returned her bandanna to her face, covering it completely. It seemed to have grown darker since they'd stopped, she noticed, even through her goggles.

This was... a sign? This Bee Bee was First Order property? That would be bad. Checkpoints? She'd never passed through one, at least not knowingly. Would she recognize them now? From what she'd gathered, the Empire wore white and were aliens, the First Order preferred black and were humans—like her, supposedly. Expect black-clad figures, then. And she hadn't used it this time, but she had her staff. She could probably find some other equipment and weapons elsewhere.

But right now, their priority would be shelter. With dark came some things even junkers were cautioned about. Like bats… and secret patrols clad in shadow under shadows.

She took a step. Then another. Soon, she regained the old pace. Bee Bee chirped, rolled after her. She couldn't follow those riders' eyes as well as she would've liked, 'specially not that larger brill. She realized now, with some feeling of foolishness, of stupidity, that they'd seen it. Even if they weren't First Order, bad things could come if someone knew.

Though this did not correlate to her train of thought in a way she could comprehend, she remembered her "family" was still somewhere out there. They would still be searching. Or else they would have forgotten her and moved on, which was the best thing she could possibly hope for. And why she couldn't permit herself to believe that for a second. Stupid, stupid, stupid!

She didn't even remember _Bee Bee_ was supposed to lead _her_ , though the droid remained silent. He'd lost all geographical points of reference some time ago, anyways.

* * *

Finn and Poe knew they were in for a bad time once night fell. Even if the First Order were as scary to the locals as they themselves believed, two Terror Troopers with no backup units were bound to find danger.

The sky was some fiery blaze of orange that turned the rusty sands to evening black. Cannon fire overhead was drowned out by some wandering clouds, probably not a natural thing. And the hum… Neither was sure if it was the speeder or something else which hummed to deeply, so almost-nauseatingly, to them. Like a ringing in their ears.

Finn was stood upright, steadying himself with one hand on a guardrail as he scanned the growing darkness. He had no goggles or binoks, only the equipment taken from their unfortunate guards.

"We need to find shelter somewhere, we can't search in this light," Finn announced. His voice was garbled ever-so-slightly through the First Order mask. One looking closely enough would see obvious cues taken from a single source: triangular mouth grating, colorless eyes, downcurved brow plate, the long-backed _staller_ which covered the entire back of the skull down to the base of the neck. All of this was done on purpose, of course.

"Stop passenger-driving, you know I hate it," Poe replied. "No, we don't, and yes, we can. There's a whole spectrum in these Terry _visils_ at our disposal, we don't even need to make our presence known."

"And here's my response to all of the above: I. Know. But you also read the same reports I did: the locals don't go out after dark. Either they'll have some means of hiding, or…" He let his partner finish the thought. He grimaced.

"We'll need some protection as well, then. Start scanning for intact hull pieces large enough to hold the speeder."

"On it." The scientist set the optics in his _visil_ to scan for seismic disturbances, sonic anomalies. A small readout at one corner of his vision started listing data and scrolling through faster than he could read it. With his free hand he pushed aside the _staller_ a little and toggled the readouts on his temple. Deft fingers punched in specific filters, set parameters, activated. He set the headpiece back into place, and resumed examining as Poe drove.

Nothing. An old X-wing, a yardful of Old Imperial TIEs in pieces no larger than his torso, some things which might have been the carcasses of **very** large animals. Poe kept driving.

"Anything?"

"Nothing so far. Just a bunch of small pieces."

"Figures. Remember those polar reports we received?"

"Yes."

"This is all normal, magnets mess everything up! Great for manipulating weak signals, terrible for any ships getting too close."

"Hence progress up top being impossible?"

"Hence that, yup." Finn sighed. Even as they'd talked, he was scanning. Still nothing. And what was so dangerous about night to these people—the Jakkui? The orange sky, even through the _visil_ , blazed somewhere closer to a purple-red now. Like a fire which would scorch the whole planet for hours upon hours, perhaps even millennia upon millennia. He understood some of what had them afraid to go out, if only the feelings of it.

On and on. The hum persisted, modulating in volume but not in pitch. Poe, who'd boasted many a time of his good pitch in his earlier days, listened closely.

"It's a dip-besh—either that or a natural aurek, somewhere in there."

This tickled some memory within Finn.

"Remember… that one Captain-Hopt, who insisted we memorize the March of the Order so we could sing as we marched?"

Poe chuckled at that. The March of the Order was in harmonic dip-besh. Maybe it was a sign that the Order was never far behind—it wasn't, both of them knew that much. Neither was Heldown, now.

"Still not finding anything."

"Neither did that Captain-Hopt. What was his name, Krennic-something? Old Imperial lineage going all the way back to the Clone Wars, measured our step heights until he could say we were like perfect droids." Neither of them had been happy with Captain-Hopt Krennic-Gell either, nor had any of the thousand-or-so other assorted Order members under his command been happy. Parading streets with stony solemnity written on every exposed face had not been hard at all.

"Probably dead by now. How fast does this speeder go?"

"Why, want me to punch it?"

"Yes." Both chuckled slightly. Finn held the guardrail all the way back to the cockpit, precariously dropped himself into the seat beside Poe. He strapped in.

"Good choice. Up to terminal we go. Whoo!" Finn felt it. Poe felt it. Finn heard it, almost overpowering that hum which had hung with them all this time. Almost. Poe had almost managed to tune it out, or at least convince himself he had.

Now everything zipped by, blurring, stretching. Finn saw now that the red sky was becoming darker and darker… and darker. He'd once seen a planet with some kind of ferrum-trace atmosphere which turned the cloud and the lightnings red as Vader's blade. He hoped he would not see such a sight again. Probably would, regardless.

No choice but to keep marching onward to the beat they were given. The speeder kept going. They kept going, stopping once when they both decided it was time to relieve themselves. They did so in shifts, then returned to seeking something—anything—out. The sky was purple now, and the length of a day seemed longer than he'd remembered. How long had they been out here? And were there yet more lasers up there,

Finally, something changed. Finn regretted their hope that they would find something.

They found a cliff—a sheer drop up ahead, just cut off from the land. Finn pointed it out.

"I see it. Could be something." And so he went forward, decelerating enough that they would stop at its edge. Finn didn't like that part much. As such, Poe swung around so that the passenger-side had the best view. "How's it look over there?" _Can people sound like they're enjoying something far too much? And have it feel condescending despite it very much being nothing of the sort?_

"Not now, Poe." He actually peered over:

An abyss of brown stone and orange sand. Nothing else. The drop down had to be several kilometers, and that was just sloping at a right angle; counting the gradual curve, it could've reached to Infinity and Finn wouldn't be surprised. And in this purple-black light, it might just be exactly that.

"I think…" He elaborated to his partner, "it's one of those oceansides—the ones in the reports. Take the ocean out of the ocean, leaves you with jutting continents and millions of square miles of nothing."

Poe sighed. Discontented, but not angry, or even necessarily disappointed.

"There were hollows and trenches and whatnot mentioned, yeah?"

"Yeah. Should we risk it?"

"We don't have another choice. Down we go!" Being more considerate this time, Poe turned them forward, and they drove straight out like a Holo-toon of the Wiler Wolf. Picking up a little speed and losing a little altitude, they slowly descended deeper and deeper. Finn's ears wanted to pop. After seven minutes at this downward angle, they did—first the left, then the right.

Gradually, they reached some sort of bottom—now crusted over with dust and brittle remains of things that might've once been alive. One strange formation in particular...

"Is that…?" _A gigantic animal._

"Probably."

"Will it shelter the speeder?"

"It's an option. Find an opening." So Finn did: somewhere around what could've been its ribcage. Poe maneuvered the speeder in, dropped it under the skeleton of this grand animal. Outside, the sky shifted from purple to a nocturnal shade of blue.

"Tarptent over the cockpit. We'll sleep it out."

"Sounds decent. What do you think's out there?" He was already reaching into their cargo hold for the long sheet in question.

"If it's bad enough, and it's here, we'll sure find out. Here, take the other end." Finn did, stretched it over to the windshield, clipped it to the hooks on the screen's frame.

"We're secure." With that, Poe threw the other end of the tarptent over the back end of the cockpit, blinding them to the sky. "Nighty-night, FN-2187."

Neither slept a wink that night; The silence and the unknown set both on edge. And while they didn't know it, something was indeed coming with Heldown: Bats by the thousands—venomous things the size of your torso, without much of a mind as to who or what they munched on. There was always some idiot or skeptic who stayed out too long after dark, thinking one of these swarms were not nearby and/or willing to simply take their chances.

Among those who "took their chances" were the two stormtroopers who had seen both Rey and Charlie. Following a rotating schedule of duties in and outside the Jakkui Imperial base, they had been assigned to long-distance scouting duties. And this had placed them right in the path of a particularly large group of bats, which had torn through their speeder engines and nibbled through the softer spots in their armor.

Meanwhile, Rey and "Bee Bee" rested inside the hull of a starfighter that predated most Imperial/Republic junk by several millennia.

The First Order suffered dearly, however. Serbris and Kylo repelled any bats with their blades and a couple well-placed shots, which had not been easy and cost seven Terror Troopers. Would've been eight without the Knights pitching in a couple more supernatural elements.

Makes you appreciate how lucky some characters are, doesn't it? Especially when they stay together.

* * *

The 223rd Platoon remained camped together some five miles outside Net Station. The black-clad Knights of Ren had not so much as moved for the entire night after those bats had come through. A constant shift of guards had ensured there would be no further surprises. And when dawn came, Phasma had kicked her Terror Troopers wide awake.

"Get up! We have dead to dispose of." One by one, her men regained consciousness. At least one clutched his bleeding nose where she'd kicked. "Visils, all of you!" They followed the order, shoving their aching faces into the black duraplast masks of the First Order Terror Trooper, carefully modeled to evoke Darth Vader and the most terrifying Old Imperial soldiers under his command. They'd even taken the titles of some of these, although they were supposedly more hesitant to do the cybernetics thing.

They complied, and she gathered two of them to handle the seven dead while the rest dealt with their encampment.

"I go with you," came a voice muffled by a thick animal mask. She looked up to see that they were wrong—the Knight of Ren had indeed moved. And all at once he was beside her.

"If you say so," she answered venomously.

"I do." Behind them, the two Terror Troopers lugged the seven bodies lost to the night in a net. All completely stripped of clothing, leaving bare bodies and the ever-abundant marks by which they had died. They were no longer First Order, just people. Bodies. Dead ones.

"Dig the hole," she ordered. Both pulled out their tools and obeyed. Beside Phasma, Serbris Ren held out one hand. Fingers clutched at airy threads, his wrest seemed to tremble as if buckling.

As they dug, they seemed to pull up whole clumps of dirt—not loose sand, but whole chunks of sandy soil larger than the oversized spoons which scooped them from the surface of the planet. Were they not so intent on doing the job, this would've shocked them, possibly even distracted them from working. Maybe the job was all they could comprehend at the moment, which, in this scenario, would also be Serbris Ren's doing.

"They work fast."

"You're welcome."

Soon, the mounds forming around the hole became human-sized, then larger still. The hole the two Terries dug became deep enough to fit seven bloodied, birth-bare corpses. Then they proceeded to drop those bodies into that hole and cover it up with dirt—loose dirt now. Serbris walked away, and Phasma followed him. They worked sluggishly now, were probably irritable.

"Any word from the checkpoints?" Serbris asked Phasma.

"Nothing. A few junkers, little else. No droids. Not even scrapped ones." He didn't need to tell her to keep looking. They were all still searching—two droids lost by the First Order is a wound to every Terry's pride, after all.

The Hunter returned to the Interrogator's side. Both stared out into the open.

"What exactly was on the droid?"

"Can't be sure. Everything, most likely—including Starkiller data."

"Bad news." Kylo Ren made no response to that.

Behind them, Captain Phasma had her soldiers waiting in their speeders. Specially-fitted things for long, hard terrain, they looked on the outside like just boxes with some little sticks pointing out of them—engines and guns. And, of course, they sported the proud silver-black color scheme of the First Order. Even against the Jakkui sands, on which it stood out on every plane except those littered with junk.

"Any time today, _Knights of Ren_!"

"We're comin', we're comin'," Serbris poked back, equally snide.

"You can track them," Kylo added. It was a statement, not a question. Even an order.

"Yes, I can. Just as the _grona_ said: some time today."

They headed to one of the checkpoints set up by the First Order, guided by Serbris' abstract pointing which seemed to have no bearing on any technique or telemetry. That bothered Phasma. But then again…

Finally, they reached one such checkpoint, manned by three Terrorguard in their sandblasted iterations of the standard Terror Trooper armor. One operated a turret walker—AT-AW, spiderlike, larger than any of the 223rd's speeders—two others manned the little kiosk-like station. Overhead, the flat face of some more eccentric rock formation cast a shadow over them all. Phasma opened a commlink.

"Captain Phasma to First Order checkpoint. Standby for approach."

"Copy, Cap'm." Both Knights of Ren felt the Captain cringe at the contraction. "Clear for debrief."

"Acknowledged." Slowly, the leading 223rd speeder came to a halt a grappler's throw from the AT-AW. Phasma disembarked. The orange-flagged Terrorguard stopped in front of her and assumed his attentive position. "Report."

The leader—an officer candidate, by the looks of it—addressed her sloppily, but provided every relevant detail, which Phasma liked to see.

"0423: encountered swarm of unidentified bats, passed by without incident. 0762: approached by lone scavenger, identified as a Teedo with no belongings except his equipment pouch and probable brain damage. 0900: saw anomaly on the horizon, Artillery Walker dispatched to investigate, determined to be only a vulture."

"You dispatched your _walker_ to investigate a _bird_?"

"Affirmative, Cap'—… Captain. Anomaly reported as just a trick of our binoks."

"Is that so?" He nodded.

"It is, Captain." Suddenly, without any indicative change, her Terror Captain visil seemed to be smiling. She turned back to the black-clad figures in the speeder. From between the 223rd's Troopers emerged a blankly robed figure with a pale animal's face. The Terrorguard saw the fangs first, knew he was in for a bad time.

Walking casually, Serbris Ren approached the Terrorguard, hands swaying only slightly at his sides. Within seven steps he stood where Phasma had only a moment before, with his left hand to the right side of the soldier's visil.

"Tell me what you saw." The guard's whole two-piece helmet began quaking, rattling. Muscles tensed in his neck, his jaw. An electric eel latched itself to his spine, sending out little _spazz_ es of uncontrollable twitching. But this was not the result, merely an amusing byproduct. The _real_ magic was happening between the two minds as they were suddenly connected by some cosmic circuit switched to "on". Then the quaking stopped, leaving its recipient nervous and exhausted. Serbris turned to the Captain.

"Got it. Quicker to follow alone—I'll need my speederbike."

"We'll ping your location."

"Understood. But _nothing else_. This one's mine."

Through the thing which connected them, Kylo Ren felt old instincts telling him his fellow Knight would need him there. Or else things would go very wrong very fast.

"I follow from behind. _It_ tells me that you'll need another." He stepped from between the Terror Troopers and stood some distance between Phasma and Serbris, forming a sort of triangle. Around them, the First Order watched the scene with a combination of apathy, curiosity and fear.

The ever-scowling mask seemed to scowl further. Kylo's own mask remained perfectly neutral, eyeband narrowed, silvery brow arched in its usual abstract way.

"No. You follow an alternate path. Two traitors as well and another droid."

Phasma cut in: "A second droid?"

"They employed a second astromech for computation, records will show. Reported missing shortly after their capture. A CR unit. If you need to split up further, you can discuss that with Little Miss Phasma here. Understood?" Kylo did not so much as move.

"Understood." Two of Phasma's soldiers wheeled out a personal speederbike for Serbris. They retracted the platform into their own transport, and the Knight of Ren mounted it, playfully throwing aside his outer robes, exposing the silver square-shape mounted to his belt, revving the thing's engines only once before promptly taking off, following what his alien Sense had told him.

That left Phasma, Kylo Ren, a couple First Order Terror Troopers and a dusty trail on an otherwise-deserted sandy plane.

Of course, as none but the Hunter himself would believe, the vulture had indeed been user error. Kylo might've suspected something like that, too, although his own Sense was less attuned to that aspect of things. If they'd seen what happened earlier that morning, though...

* * *

It had been late in the night when Rey suddenly came to. She'd had some sort of dream she couldn't remember, except that her dream world and waking world were completely irreconcilable. Not enough sand, junk or bats. There had been cannibals, however, and sky lasers. She remembered those two details, and that was it.

She bumped her head on the hull of the ship. That cleared her head—it was probably also the reason for her amnesia. She'd bumped her head a couple times before, kept track each time: once as a very young girl, twice on the hull of an older ARC fighter a year or two after Unkar took her, assorted spitefully urgent knocks by Wiles and others in her teen years when running away had been a feverish pipe dream. How many nights ago at that Republic ship. Two?

Yes, probably two. She rolled around, saw Bee Bee casting his own little light into the darkness.

"Heading out early today. You hungry?" Two beeps. "Good. Me neither. Not that we'd have anything, anyway." Hunger had started to gnaw at her, but that was nothing new. _Wiles' stew sometimes had a negative effect on their appetites, this is better_ , she joked to herself. She considered saying it aloud, but this droid wouldn't understand. Or maybe he would. But still she remained silent.

There wasn't much to their little encampment. Just the hull they'd slept under as the bats passed them by, a safe distance between the two parties. It was still Heldown outside, though. They could always run into that same problem again.

They set out within five minutes. Even that felt like sluggish time for Rey.

The pair walked for quite a few miles. Most of everything was pretty barren now. The only things that moved were the dunes; the only things that lived were, perhaps, the vultures. Even those were scarce, growing scarcer every day.

Very faintly, the cannon fire in the sky canceled out a few of what stars there were, leaving the world outside Jakku incredibly empty at this early hour. Everything had a hue to it, Rey noticed, as if the world itself were still asleep.

They walked for several hours. Stopped a couple times for various mundane things—breaks, essentially, which were as prompt and to-the-point as a single step. Taking any longer felt like a burden to Rey. Especially since the droid needed not relieve itself or stop to rest. The former Rey dealt with through her cyclesuit, which also solved her water problem, if at an unsavory cost.

"Doesn't bother me," she explained in a sudden, brief outburst of boredom. "No more than anything else on this world, at least." Bee Bee had only beeped some generic expression even she was sure were not true words.

In the early morning, they finally saw something: a sort of mountain up ahead. And as they grew closer, Rey saw that it was not a whole mountain at all—more half a mountain after some giant had taken a blade down its middle. What she did not know was how this had happened: a stray superlaser during some long-ago battle, much like the planet-wide siege overhead. Even now, some thousands of years later, this scar had remained static.

She saw the flashing lights indicating the station. Heard the rumble of the turret-walker. Between them was some sort of old _arrolio_ , like a natural trench, perfect for this situation. Rey sunk into it, measuring the situation. It was still early morning outside. Rey was certain all three soldiers there were lethargic at this early hour, despite whatever training they may receive.

She didn't know much of who these soldiers could be (maybe New Empire, maybe Grand Republic, maybe the First Dynasty, she could never keep track for long), but she was certain it had something to do with the droid.

"Yours?" She whispered to him. One beep. "Great. And your goal is through this way?" One. A shaky one, at that. He probably hadn't expected her to notice that. "Would going around them delay us?" Equally shaky on that single tone. "Would they detect us?" No uncertainty on that one. She wasn't sure how they'd get through this.

Then the bats came. She heard them swarming some distance away, gasped to herself as they grew closer and closer. She'd always hated the things, didn't know how she could've ever thought to step outside the Republic ship that night. Given, the bats never stayed in one place for long. And she'd forgotten about that…

She would not forget now. She would become a bat.

"On my signal, we run. They're dangerous, but they spook easy when you know what'll do the trick." She reached for her staff. "Part of the reason I've held this for so long." Single beep.

The swarm continued to approach. No, these were not normal bats. Like all things on this world, they were nomadic beyond all belief. They dined on whatever soft bits they could, had learned to avoid things which were large metal and flashed unnaturally. Their ancestral tendency to avoid the ocean had begun wearing off some years ago. But, all in all, they were bats. Dark, leathery mammals with clawed wings and needle-fangs, eyes like the Vader's blade, ears like a second set of demonic wings. And, despite their dangers in numbers and ferocity, ultimately stupid.

Rey and the droid, the MagnaGuard's electrostaff between them, followed the swarm around the station. Given, they'd probably had some extra help: something any Jakkui survivor would simply call luck.

And, after all, think of _a whole swarm!_

* * *

Poe and Finn woke up around a similar time. Their tarptent had exactly one hole in it: a pinkie-sized thing that might've come from a stray fang, a rock, a stick, any number of things which should not have punctured it without ridiculous force. That thought wasn't a pleasant one.

They readied a small breakfast in silence, readied some water rations, and promptly took off. Both of them saw the fuel readout, but neither wanted to think much of it.

Thankfully, they'd also snagged a radio on the way out. They wouldn't typically be powerful enough to reach across a planet, but Jakku was a prime spot for signal bursts. Were Charlie here, he would remind them in endless droves of the magnetic powers of Jakkui poles, the history of Net Station, the power it gave to a transmitter. Now they listened to every message sent over the waves.

_"Sector 13… No activity… Late bats… [static]…"_ Stuff like that. If they kept track of where sectors were located, they could look where the First Order simply was not looking.

"Sounds like they got the worst of it."

"Using First Center as a reference point…" Finn muttered, following the HoloMap with his finger. "That leaves Sectors 21, 37, 94, 18, and everything North of 16 and South of 122. We could try searching beyond the main continent, but…"

"We're currently just re-entering the main continent, got it. Besides, neither Beebee nor Charlie is dumb enough to move _that_ far away from Net."

"Could they have survived last night?"

"Hopeful. In all likelihood they've found traveling companions, one way or the other."

"Stay together, die together?"

That sent Poe into an even more solemn silence than usual. He'd been caught being a hypocrite again.

"That's different. That was just—"

"Words of wisdom to two highly suggestible droids. Just telling them to get _far, far away from one another._ "

"What do you mean?"

"I _mean_ we're staying together. What does that tell you?"

"It tells me…" He sighed uncomfortably. "It tells me we're a team. One way or another, we don't have an option."

"But we do. Split up, cover more ground that way."

"We only have one—"

"Then if anything happens, we die together!"

Silence. The speeder's engine hummed just a little bit louder to fill that void. Poe searched for words until… well, until he found them.

"And that bothers you?"

"Yes, that bothers me. This planet, especially. Anything can kill us."

"Yes, it can. But what we're doing isn't just about how dangerous this planet is. It's about how dangerous the _galaxy_ is. All the known universe, in fact. You know that as well as I do."

"Then why am I still afraid?"

Poe couldn't answer that. Instead, he followed the much more mundane, familiar route: driving the speeder. Finn remained his spotter, searching for something neither wanted to admit they would not find. And he followed the much more productive pattern of monitoring First Order movements. The 223rd was roaming the whole continent. But as long as they monitored reports from checkpoints, they would be well enough hidden from all of them.

"They're bringing in more ornithopters now," Finn informed Poe casually.

"Great. How many?" Mechanical.

"Half a dozen. The rest are assigned exclusively to Big Game Up Top."

"And again, campaigning to retake Net Station works to our advantage. It's providence, I'm telling you." But he wasn't telling Finn it was providence. He wasn't really telling him anything.

The landscape around them gradually became more familiar in the early light. The sky overhead was clear, shifting into that bizarre shade of orange-pink before settling into the more familiar blue as time wore on. Both nibbled and sipped at their rations. Both eventually put on their Terry visils, adding in the staller to keep the sunlight off them. Both started sweating like salty sponges in the black two-piece helmets.

Couple new geographical landmarks to break up the uniformity of this continent: the usual shipwrecks occurring in larger and larger groups as they neared the pole, every once in a while passing some sort of junker, usually a group of them. There was a single tree about half an hour more into their journey—a withered, crumbling thing that had been made to insult the rest of the world. Instead, it only embarrassed itself.

Finn pointed out a speeder in the distance, followed it with his binoks. Set on highest magnification, the rider was barely discernible as entirely black-clad, and moving in the direction opposite them. It was an Order speeder, and it was clearly too far away to register them.

They saw only two ornithopters, both times passing at such a high altitude or such a ridiculous horizontal distance that they skimmed the edges of the aircrafts' sensors. But nothing came of this, either.

As his body fell into the routine, Poe found himself thinking back to when they'd first stolen that original speeder…

_The night had been forecast and confirmed as a special kind of storm—the "clear night with winds to startle most harmful indigenes" kind. They would not get another chance like tonight. They'd had to disable its transponder, fake its requisition on multiple work sheets, disguise themselves as suitable requisitioners, and avoid questions about a gyromech and a computing astromech accompanying them out onto the sands._

_The guard hadn't believed them. "Stop right there," he'd ordered to them. "Let me hear your orders." Nervously, Poe had repeated his authorization keycode to the guard, who checked his own data, was clearly shooting them a glance under the brow of his narrow-brimmed grey hat, but scowled and had let them through. The double doors behind him welcomed the two scientists with open sliders._

_"That was close," Finn muttered to him._

_"Well, it'll get a whole lot closer. Count on it."_

_"I am. Can't change that I'm a bit worried."_

_"I'd be even more worried if you weren't worried." A chuckle eased Finn's shaking hands as he loaded Charlie onto the flat-topped scratch-skiff, muttering his usual half-human dialogues of all the things neither FN-2187 nor PO-3675 would want to think about. Beebee seemed more obviously grim. That had always been Beebee, though._

_That had been when they removed the transponder, severing it from the primary frame and leaving it transmitting in the nearest trash receptacle. Taking off the heavy Terror Trooper armor save the helmet, they bolted out of the hangar—that had probably been a dead giveaway. They would also find the transmitter not long after._

_He hoped Finn had had luck with his shaking hands; Poe himself could barely keep the unfamiliar ship level, especially in high winds, which had helped matters none at all._

Today, winds were negotiable.

_Huh, reminds me of another of those Holoprograms. The one with the old Chancellor and the coughing droid general._ Under his breath, he coughed out his best impression of the malformed creature:

_"Army or not, you must realize: You. Are. Doomed."_

He did realize it.

* * *

Rey and Bee Bee continued onward for several hours. The little gyromech had recognized a couple smaller landmarks, confirming that whatever impulse had led the duo in this direction had indeed been right. They were still quite a distance away, however.

Rey had forgotten how to question her sense of direction, in much the same way she had forgotten her ability to thirst or hunger, or to question where she came from. It was a very special kind of delirium, the Jakkui Focus; that was what those few who discussed it would call the phenomenon, anyway. A trance which disregards all other mental faculties as if they did not exist.

Her eyes acknowledged the insectlike vehicles in the air without a first thought, much less a second. And any fellow junkers they passed, few though they were estimated to be. She didn't think of the fact that at least one among these was mounted, nor the weapons they all carried, nor anything of that sort. _Just keep moving, don't stop, don't look back. Just forward._

Eventually, she registered enough of her face was sweating to warrant she take the time to put on her bandanna and goggles. Just this simple motion broke her of the Focus. She finally saw the world around her as if for the first time. Not much wreckage in her vicinity, but…

In the distance, a Star Destroyer. Through the lenses of her goggles, she picked out a similar capitalship a little father off. Both had stabbed their noses to the ground as if it would pass around them like so many obedient little children. Something about this image made her scoff, bouncing the burning air off the sandcloth and back into her mouth and nose.

Maybe there'd be pieces of these that had not yet been stripped. Fat chance, but very possible. Or maybe she'd find these had been deposited more recently. Fat chance of that, too, but the battle overhead could not stagnate without a steady stream of losses.

This had her looking up—it really was much the same. But… larger now, as if—!

"I believe we're coming closer," she commented to Bee Bee. "That is, if…?" _Beep._ "Then I've done something to help cross the land. We're not done yet." This last bit wasn't quite directed to anyone outside herself.

After finishing her little monologue, she continued on her way. Bee Bee matched her pace with her step for step, revolution for revolution.

She found that this verbosity had contaminated her focus. She could not voice her thoughts to her own brain anymore. They just came out.

"I hope my family do everything they can to find me. I hope they turn up empty. That Unkar bakes in Hel. Wiles falls to his death. The Teedos are shot off the skiff with their heads gone." Bee Bee took this in, noting pragmatically how day-to-day survival requirements affect a person's state of mind. And it did not affect her sense of direction in the slightest. Besides, what could he do to stop her? Beep twice? Beep three times?

"Whatever it is you need, I'm not just doing this for you. I'm doing it because I needed away from there. You'll help me escape this place." Again, Bee Bee considered this as making a decent amount of sense. He turned his attention to the world around them: much the same assessment as Rey. Something she could not (consciously) sense, however, was the magnetic potency of this region. As Poe and Finn had both mentioned many times, this world had Net Station for a legitimate reason.

"…And I… It'll be the dirtiest, saddest pile of junk you can conjure, but it'll have speed unlike any other. Once we reach space, I'll…" She trailed off, suddenly remembering what she did not know. Space. She knew nothing of the World Up There. Obviously, since the fighting had started some time after her earliest memories, it had not always been there. There had to be something more, yet…

It would not be this world, all she could ever remember. It would be unlike even her wildest dreams and fantasies, for better or worse. And that was exactly how she wanted it. No matter what, she would win.

"Except, of course, if it's all just Jakku—dirt and wreckage and distant giants you can't touch." She chuckled humorlessly. "That'd make this all for nothing, wouldn't it?" Beep. Staccato beep. One and a half? "That wasn't a yes or a no, was it?" Beep. Beep.

They just kept walking. Slowly, something crept up inside Rey. Some feeling that she would be wise to prepare for the worst. That the worst was still to come. And it was, she had reasoned logically.

Bee Bee pointed out a First Order ornithopter to her as it flew overhead. Hurriedly, she thought of it as a gigantic, lumbering beast with hundreds of eyes but terribly poor vision. She gathered the little droid under herself and crouched over him, letting her sunbaked sandcloth _become_ the surface of the changing desert. She remained there as it passed overhead, breathing calmly until its engine's register was long gone in another direction. Then she gathered herself on her feet, let the droid roll his sphere till its little body was stretched out, or however droids themselves thought of it.

Soon she passed under the shadow of the nearer Star Destroyer. It was even taller in person—one of the tallest she'd ever seen. It was a newer design, or else a far older one, although that was far less likely. It was thicker around the middle, squatter, honestly uglier. Made all the Star Destroyers she'd seen in the past look shapely. The faded emblem on its hull was distinct, too: a hexagonal shell around a ring of inward spikes. New Republic, perhaps? No, that seemed unlikely. She'd seen the New Republic emblem before, this was completely separate.

The First Order.

That was indeed what it was.

"Hopefully there's more variety in the coming days," she rambled. "If the debris is all like this, they won't be too pleased." Again, no response from Bee Bee, none needed.

The next Star Destroyer, unfortunately, was the same model, but out of their way. All the better for it, Rey decided.

Something hot whizzed past her; the report of the blaster it was fired from came chasing after.

"Get behind me," Rey said calmly.

Another shot. Another. Both little red sparks given direction, given purpose. She could follow it—opposite direction from what she'd expected.

"Other 'behind me'," she corrected. Her staff was out, crackling. Her eyes were sharp. Ahead of her, stretching indefinitely, was a glassy mirage which must've been infected with some sort of black fog. Another blood-red blaster bolt reflected and refracted off every molecule of disturbed air, emerging to streak past her again. The black virus became smaller, condensed, focused. She gripped her staff even tighter, planting her feet in a fighting stance. And again, the report came far too late.

She had some distant, tongue-in-cheek thought of catching and deflecting those blaster bolts with her staff itself, arms and hands circling almost at the speed of light. Funny thought, wouldn't help her now.

But another funny thought: they would die if they stayed here. Another rule of Jakkui Economy: You stay there, you die there.

A hoarse whisper: "New plan: run." The droid did. More blaster fire behind them, now assuming some kind of constant rhythm, perhaps some musical motif—she didn't know much of music, but the grasping of an idea is still there. She ran for all she could, like a bug in the dirt, and Bee Bee was an even smaller bug. If a bolt went right and the next went left, she leaned her orientation to the right, and vice versa. Exactly as the Hunter wanted.

He had dismounted, Sensing his quarry would play into his hands on foot. He drew the square hilt—a blastersaber, raised it to chest-level, fired off at them. Not shooting directly, but dictating the path in which they would run. Coolly, with all the ease of shooting big game since childhood, he measured his steps forward. He could feel the rising panic in his target's protector. She would breathe heavily, sweat uncontrollably to have the fluids cycled through back into her system. She would run herself to hysteria and exhaustion if only he kept on her.

Rey knew both of those things would happen to her, too. She still had her staff. Recognizing this mistake, she took a blink to reprimand herself, and turn to face her opponent. The pale monster's mask popped against the cloudy black garb. The glare off his weapon was just as ferocious and painful as those blasts.

"Bee Bee, keep going. I'll catch up if I can!" She didn't stop to see if he acknowledged

She dug her feet. Again decided against that, ran at him. The steady _wump-woomf-wampf_ of her staff swaying in her left hand was perhaps the most reassuring thing her senses were telling her.

The Hunter saw this change, although to Rey he seemed to have no reaction. Like he'd wanted her to act like this. His shooting arm came down. _He has another weapon—in his other hand. Yet…_

Neither hand moved. She was within thirty feet of him. Twenty. Still nothing. Fifteen. Twelve. Ten. Eight. Seven. Six.

His red lightsaber emerged once she reached five feet. This caught Rey offguard, though letting herself become shocked was not permitted. She raised her staff to cross the blade. The Knight of Ren was ready. His blade twisted and was pointed down, ready to catch her as she charged him.

She tilted her staff to knock the saber upward, shoving down to buzz him in the leg. She heard a hardly-whispered grunt of pain, but no more. She couldn't keep track of that blade on her own, heard a blaster much closer this time, something searing through her flesh, sending a _poot_ noise through her cyclesuit over the hum of the two melee weapons. They held there, clashing for a moment, then the Ren deactivated his saber. Somehow she caught the trick, again getting under the blade and catching it as it reactivated, using her weight to throw the enemy backwards.

He slid a little, caught his balance, started forward as if running without moving. His saber was extended straight forward, burning like the flames of Hel. Thankfully, she also had the reach advantage. Remembering some old Holo of a solid-weapon joust, she slammed her staff directly into him. Later, she would realize she had no idea how this could've worked.

Now Rey started running, before even seeing him double over. Bee Bee must've been a ways off, she couldn't see him up ahead. But she knew he was out there, just waiting for her to catch up. She kept her staff active as she ran.

Behind her, Serbris Ren made some internal swear. But his Sense told him that he had indeed trapped her. A perspective outside his own would see her helpless. But he would need to follow through on his part in it.

He walked back to his speeder with a gimp in his leg. That weapon really packed a wallop. And something had flowed through her as well… Survivors on this world needed every advantage they could get, after all. If he caught his prey again, he would make it a victory to saver.

* * *

Rey was panting by the time she found Bee Bee. A glance at the ground where she stood told her the leak in her cyclesuit was very bad. A steady drip of recycled fluids—and some extra—colored the brown sands grey.

"I'll need to fix that. Soon. How close are we to your destination?" Beep. Beep. She sighed with some withheld anger. Quietly, then (almost) screaming to herself. " **Within. A day's. Walk?** " Beep. "Good! Forget the stupid cyclesuit!" She resumed walking, panting. A lifetime of various injuries could make a junker forget the danger of pain.

And painless wounds.

Ahead, another junker party. One large vessel's silhouette split in two. Then three. It found its final shape as four forms approaching from her horizon. Her staff was still activated.

In all this time trusting the weapon as a tool she could not live without, Rey'd never questioned how it did not lose charge. Its manufacturer, whose logo had long since faded and been scratched to oblivion, would say this: "Focusing crystals and some self-sustaining circuitry—just like the lightsabers your droids will take for you!"

But compared to whatever that black figure had been, she could handle a few unruly neighbors. That was, if they approached them at all.

No need to question that possibility; they never once broke away. Just kept coming for her. As was the Jakkui way, approach is a declaration of war.

"I suppose I'm ready to kill. Again." Her first time killing, she'd been unable to count her years. It was foggy, but it had been a wild animal. Or an aggressive junker, maybe both. She'd used something sharp, had held the thing inside the creature until it stopped moving. After that, she couldn't remember whether she'd started giggling or crying.

One speeder approached before the others—a big one hiding a big rider behind a big grille.

"Be ready to run. Not yet, though." Jakkui instinct. Instinct could be wrong, however, or otherwise influenced.

" _Pwazhka zhoh'do krii'keé!_ " The rider started laughing, swinging the larger speeder 'round so he could face Rey. Tailed, fangs fighting to escape his mouth. Forked tongue. He laughed and said some other things Rey would never claim she could understand.

She ran at him, staff raised but not extended. That tail caught her before she could remember that appendage was more than just a balancing piece. It slammed the staff from her hand, knocked it to the ground. She herself was thrown against the hull of the ship, the heat coming off its engines making her more than just wince. Again with the syllables she could not understand. She tried using her arms, her legs, anything to push herself free. No use. She stopped flailing. If there were opportunities later, there'd be opportunities later.

The heat from the metal hull of this speeder was not even enough to cause a first-degree burn in the medical sense, but it hurt. Scalding. She wanted to get the words out to tell Bee Bee to run, but her jaw was pinned by a jutting cube of metal. _This brill's made a routine of this, hasn't he?_

The other three vehicles approached. The tail's pin against her back fluctuated; never enough to let her free. Talking in what sounded like several different languages, or else just mismatched accents. Fast talking. Cackling. Heavy breathing.

Droid noises. Whirring of servomotors. Rapid beeping. Other noises Rey didn't have a name for.

Finally, she heard something in a tongue she _could_ understand.

"A human! We could use a human. Young, in decent shape, nothing undesirable except maybe that she's not one of us."

"That's the way it goes, isn't it?" She replied. First mistake, wasn't it? The tail released its grip on her, spilling her to the ground. She tried getting to her feet, was slammed down again.

She tried getting up one more time, this time not getting to her feet but simply to her knees. She was not denied this.

In front of her were two other speeders and the main barge. Every thug in front of her had a bladed weapon in their hand—claw, forepaw, talons, she couldn't keep track of all of them. Eight total—two on other speederbikes, six on or around the main barge. Everything was _Franksterr_ ed together in that way only the Jakkui can _Frankster_ anything.

The leader emerged as the skinny, tall one with the white hair, porcine face and blood-red lips, parting the crowd on the barge to make way for him. Tusks were never a good sign, either. But it was the leader who had spoken to her.

"Human. Traveling alone. Except…" A snap of clawed fingers had the speeder rider on Rey's left bringing out a net. Same trick she—and the Teedo before her—had used.

" _Smoerlzo-Jakkuj'ii! Today is a good day!_ " His thugs momentarily echoed the statement as a cheer—whoops, hollers, ululations.

They dragged both the droid and the girl to the main barge.

* * *

_Above._

Twenty First Order Star Destroyers, eighteen-thousand TIEs: standard Hexects, Interceptors, Bombers, all swarming like so many migratory birds to nowhere. They were blocked by the scumships, the ARC-220s, various Wing models—weapons of the new Republic. The Empire made do with a fleet of some seven-thousand clawcraft and their heavy carriers, blasting both off and holding their ground, if only that.

New Station itself wasn't that big an affair—three main buildings all interconnected to the antenna tower, which extended some two-hundred feet at its highest point. At any given time, little pockets of Old Empire and First Order both retained partial claim to it, and day-to-day life was a constant back-and-forth of sieges.

Today, however, something had changed. A fresh New Republic wing had just dropped out of hyperspace. B-wings, modified Y-wings, deathtrap V-wings, folding P-wings, all led by a green-striped starfighter which seemed to move like light itself.

It had seen such ships before. During the Empire's reign, it had never been taken. Some months after a certain unfinished ball of death became a manmade supernova, it had been attacked. By Rebel scum, and… for about thirteen years, the Rebels and Empire tossed ownership back and forth like grenades. The already-confused galaxy was treated to a mismatched slew of old Imperial reruns and transmissions with even more archaic origins.

Enter the First Order. Not even the great Grand Admiral Thrawn could hold ownership of Net Station for long against those numbers, which were almost double that of the Empire and definitely double that of the New Republic's. They'd kicked the old tenants out and settled in, seeking only to silence the waves, occasionally providing some older material edited to a new purpose. Without a single dominating force but a territorial triumvirate, there seemed no other choice but to take the broadcasting station back. The HoloNet, no matter how little anyone wanted to admit it, had been one of the Empire's greatest mind control tricks, as well as the Republic before it.

* * *

Finn and Poe dropped into a narrow canyon when the ornithopters spotted them.

"Any estimate how long this thing runs for?"

"Five miles, maybe," Poe answered. "You're on binoks: are they following us?"

"No, but—ROCK!" The driver swerved as the watcher screamed.

"I see it! No need to get huffy about it," he laughed grimly. "And how are we?" Finn checked the binoks, didn't see anyone behind them. He twisted in his seat, looked upward, then directly ahead. He craned up again as _something_ zoomed overhead. Not just any _zhoom_ , but an ornithopter's flutter of wings and engines. They heard the sand disturbed, too. Some of it fell around them, on their helmets. Good thing they had them; some of those were fist-sized rocks.

They kept going.

It didn't take long for the 'thopters to drop troops.

" _223rd, we have found the two traitors_ ," was intercepted on their longcomm.

"How the hell weren't we aware of this earlier!?" Poe asked Finn. Rhetorical question.

"Regulations when a comm is stolen. That message was as much for us as it was for them."

Then the soldiers started dropping from the sky. On jetpacks they rained terror, slipping like black drops of acid through the two rock faces down into the canyon. They followed the two traitors, rifles trained.

Poe saw them. Finn saw them. Poe was driving, so Finn reached for their own rifle. He crawled to the back of the speeder and got into a suitable position.

"Remember: _shoot to kill_!" Finn nodded to himself. His crosshairs marked a leader, followed it, got a lock, he fired. Missed. Re-found his mark, fired again. Hit. The head Terry went down in flames, hit a jutting claw of rock and was scraped out of his armor. Finn followed him the whole way.

"Again!" _I'm sorry, Poe_. He did. There were six of them. He fired at the two or three clusters that formed, nicking at most one and getting some responding fire. Surprised that hadn't happened sooner. Poe kept them in a straight line; what other way was there to go? Finn kept firing. Again and again. Five of them down, another seven dropping from another 'thopter.

"Finn?" Poe called.

"Yeah?" Hesitantly.

"Finn, we're running out of canyon. Dead stop up ahead." Nothing could run forever, after all. He turned to his partner-in-crime. Poe gazed straight ahead at the iron-red wall jutting up some three-, five-hundred feet. Two 'thopters at the top. And an AT-AW.

They had no other choice.

"Poe! Stop, grab a rifle. We have a choke point!"

Poe took the idea in. It was a good one. _Finn, I hope you're as genius as I know you are._

He swerved the speeder hard, almost slamming into the wall. He parked it. Reached for their equipment in the boot, pulled it with him as he took cover behind their new shelter. Finn crawled to join him. First Order jetters were now descending in waves. Without another moment's hesitation Poe and Finn fired into the airborne crowd. The two ornithopters above them were now moving to a wider gorge through which to drop their whole bodies.

But…

Finn looked up.

All-Terrain Artillery Walkers have certain modifications to truly make them all-terrain, including grips on each leg and the main body. It was now staring its cannon down at them. They'd spent enough time around AWs that they should've seen this. But keeping track of a turret walker bent over a high ledge whilst being swarmed by soldiers on jetpacks is not easy, as Poe and Finn would agree more readily than most.

They were surrounded.

" **TRAITORS, THIS IS PATROLMAN SKORR OF THE FIRST ORDER! SURRENDER YOUR WEAPONS AND VACATE YOUR POSITION!** "

"Are we going to do that?"

"Not a chance," Poe answered. "We'll make it difficult for them, at least. Impossible at best."

"I'll agree to that." They resumed firing. The Terries fired back. The ornithopters dropped more and more of the little black stains. All were firing. They hit the speeder a number of times the two renegades could never hope to count.

Then they whipped out bigger guns.

The AW fired a warning shot at the ground in front of them. Given, a warning shot from a First Order walker is a gesture of pacification. The shockshell blasted their eardrums, turned their vision to a sizzling wave of white, sent plasma through their spines, threw them against the rocks.

( _FJOOOOMK_ )

Finn needed several moments to realize that he was not dead. Gasping, panting, ears ringing, he got his feet under him. " _Poe? Poe?_ " he tried to say, but his throat seemed to have jumped out of his mouth in the blast.

He heard Phasma, though.

" _Surrender, traitors. You don't deserve the dignity of death!_ " Distant. Amplified. Reverberating.

Still, behind what was left of the speeder, Finn scrambled, letting his white-clouded vision slowly clear. Poe was on the rocks. And one of those rocks was in _him_.

"Poe!" This time he was pretty sure the words were audible. His partner's eyes came open, blinked several times.

" _Finn_?" He nodded at his name. " _Finn. Get going. Can't… stay here._ "

"Can't." Poe's eyes settled into a narrow stare.

"What? We… _Stay together, die together._ "

"And would that be so bad?" Poe was speechless, blank. But he could tell that something had settled within Finn. And, knowing that the best they could do now was lose with the dignity this Captain Phasma would have denied them, something had. They'd reached an understanding with each other... and with Death.

"We still have our guns. Help me up."


	4. Scene 19 to Ending

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey's journey has her crossing paths with a few others as she reaches the final legs of her journey.

The barge was off once Rey and Bee Bee were aboard. They weren’t interrogated, but they weren’t stripped or eaten yet, and one of the sharpoon operators abandoned his post to keep a clawed grip on Rey’s shoulders.

The leader stood on some sort of platform, arms crossed, hands digging into the opposite forearm.

Beebee was placed in a cuff-socket, but his head could still rotate freely. He swiveled, he tilted, he saw parts of droids from all over space and time, including century-old protocol droids, gonks, even…

Computation-Cron astromech!

_ Charlie, is that you? _ If he responded, they would have possibility of coordination. If not, then he was the only one left that could

_ [It is I, unfortunately. Thankfully, no body can—] _

_“Noghzholn ni’igrotzo yilei!”_ _(Translation: “Droids! Stop talking!”)_

Ultra-high frequency _ : [Pfft. None of the listeners here have an auditory range above 60 WFR—shift your transmitters to that.] _

UHF:  _ Understood. What is your assessment of this situation? _

_ [Miscellaneous thug-meanies, nothing new on Jakku. They trashed my body, three of them are wearing me as armor. But I still have my head, just as you and this new fleshbag will need to keep yours.] _

_ Any computed scenarios? _

_ [All one-hundred-seventy-two-thousand of them. Interspecies biology gets nasty in a few of them. Cannibalism. Worse. And for us, not much better. If you can escape your cuff, cause a ruckus, girl grabs my shiny dome, we fight our way off this boat. Not sure how that’ll happen, but there’s a ninety-seven percent chance one of us gets obliterated before two uglies fall, sixty-one percent chance it’s both of us. Thirty says the girl gets chomped before either of us bite it.] _

_ Any idea where we’re headed? _

_ [The magnetic field’s stronger, can you feel it? Soon we’ll have some floaty bits, if we reach near enough the pole.] _

_ Net Station. _

_ [Yuppo.] _

_ Poe told us that we need to stay apart. You heard him, too. _

_ [And you still believe that’s our best option?] _

_ Perhaps. _

_ [Yet here we are now. Get used to it.] _

* * *

The thug holding Rey by the shoulders had the beet-red complexion and golden eyes of a  _ Diemon. _ Deciding he was tired of holding her, he dragged her to a post, pulled out two cords of rope, and bound her hands individually to the thing. Big, thick, jet-black ropes were knotted and braided, shining in Hel’s face.  _ Hair.  _ As he did, she saw that on his belt, he had some kind of razordisk, washed down with long-dried blood. She doubted he used it for  _ throwing _ .

As she was tied, the thug—plus one other from a sharpoon, after some monosyllabic jout—performed an inspection. All the way down, all the way up. The burned and blasted sections of her body were plainly observed, and the two made some small discussion. The wounds were then covered crudely. A more thorough inspection found her current array of bruises everywhere, her various scars collected since childhood. If they determined she was not in optimal condition, they would do no worse than outright kill her.

As some curious parties would be concerned, they exposed her hair to the wind. Sweaty and greasy though it was, it was intact. The big one with the razordisk-thing walked up to the leader, who nodded, shook and rocked his head in ways she could imagine as human gestures, but also knowing they meant something radically different. She’d seen species use head positions to complete words before. No idea what it meant.

The leader spoke, back turned to Rey:

“What would you want us to do with you?”

“Nothing at all, if you could manage that, except maybe let me and my droid go.” The porcine figure turned to finally face her, scowling some triangular scowl. His eyes were wide, possibly even mocking.

“Nothing at all, then. Except…” Rey knew how it went. She was an outsider, an enemy. No treatment short of sickening. Letting them be acknowledged without saying anything aloud, she nodded. Somewhere below her, Bee Bee was busy beeping away. And beeping to…? She saw something, a gunmetal-gray pyramid, an eye blinking. Same color and metal patterns as some of the armor plates she’d seen on these thugs.

_ “Noghzholn ni’igrotzo yilei!” _ There were still several junkers at the sharpoons. And this barge itself must’ve been  _ frankster _ ed beyond belief to accommodate so many of them. And so many passengers!

They continued moving…  _ noulr _ -true? Looked like. The sun was just a little below  _ nu’undie _ , indicating they had, more or less, several hours of pure Helover. And, if Bee Bee had maintained his sense of orientation, they might be headed to the right place.

The junk at her feet had started to quiver.

“The pole?”

The leader responded in turn—Brillhog, she would think of him as from now on: “They’re vulnerable. Have you seen the wars up top?” As was likely intended, her head craned up, twisting around her post to see over the large sheet thrown like a sail over one side of the barge. Indeed, the battle was not only closer, but more furious now. It seems something  _ had _ changed, after all. Brillhog resumed his explanation with confidence. She took note of the unevenness in his neck.

“Word is, New Republic’s finally grown the  _ kinakas _ to hype their secret weapon squadron over Jakku. Empire’s become the joke of the universe, but the First Order are raring to pull out, too. Only a matter of time, and nothing good comes to those who wait, only those who  _ charge _ .”

He did not elaborate further, but Rey comprehended the possibilities with some deliberation. Raiding Net Station seemed the most likely option. If resources on two sides were stretched so thin and the third needed time to cement victory, any diversions would make the remainers easy practice. Even a big guy like the razordisk-thrower could probably throw the thing point-blank.

Regardless, they seemed to still need her—want her, in the primal subtext. Human flesh, it was sometimes said, was a taste to behold. Leather made from human hair was common, too. She’d had to fight flesh-seekers off several times as Unkar and the rest of the old gang had deserted her.

She would need to escape, that was plain. The  _ how _ was an issue. But they would need to strap down everything magnic, and soon. Or else…

The three speederbikes continued to twist and buzz around the main barge.

“You have magniclamps, don’t you?” Again, the silent leader found time to talk. He had something resembling a scowl crossing his face. His eyes darted down to her body, her clothes. Now the useless cyclesuit was fully exposed to the open air in all its minor slices—and the one which had done all the damage.

“Your water needs are met by that suit, aren’t they? Not at all.” But if this frankster was any testament, it was that this gang had ingenuity. Any amount of forward planning would have them preparing for the pole. And judging by the way this barge was put together, Rey could safely assume the equipment had been merely tacked on somewhere. Thing was, she was tied by both hands to a post in the middle of the vessel’s open floor, with only some small trinkets from previous exploits laying at her feet. Looking down to confirm this, she brushed some aside with her foot. At that same moment, an engine sputtered out momentarily, and on only one foot, the erratic  _ bump _ launched her to the floor. And without her hands to break her fall, she half-landed on top of one leg. Not pleasant. She groaned.

She looked at one of the sharpoon operators—the second alien from her “inspection”, who now looked down through  _ snerb _ -like tendrils on his lips and narrow yellow slits for eyes. She took quick note of the oversized belt the junker wore, and the long blades which hung from it. Several of them. Proud conservation of a warrior’s tradition? But as long as the meat was to his liking, he would not harm her.

_ “Schloi gee! Nu bra’atzo juu’KAA!” _

“ _ Blioti soo’kaa, trakno toboi, _ ” Rey snapped at moderate volume. The only two sentences she knew, and she had no idea if they were the same language at all. But the thug rared back in offense and shock, bumping into his sharpoon launcher.

As was expected by  _ aaaaaabsolutely eeeeeeeverybody _ , the mechanism went off. Rey wanted to take advantage of this, decided to test her human-hair bonds. In the recoil of the thing’s launch, the thug doubled forward again, slamming him into Rey. Her teeth and feet would do as weapons, and the latter was closer. A good downward kick slammed the alien’s skull from two sides, shattering it. He let out a loud scream and was silenced in an instant.

As the leader and other sharpoon operators turned to see what was going on, but by that time she had hooked her foot under the thug’s belt. Hitting the deck, Rey pulled the alien towards her as a bodily shield. Two sharpoons struck it and the body spasmed, even smoked. One of the junker’s longer bladed weapons was within reach of her hands. Truth be told, she hadn’t expected any of that to work. But work it had. So far.

“ _ Worthless fleshbag _ !” Brillhog yelled, one side of his neck pulsing. He was charging at her, but the manacles had come freely by now. And she wielded the junker’s longest blade at the ready. It was no electrostaff, but it would do the trick.

The barge didn’t stop, only kept droning onward. That is because a sharpoon launcher typically runs a long cable through which electric currents will pulse, hence the fiery shock that ends a victim. That first sharpoon had buried itself in a human-sized engine housing, and as she stood herself up, rectangular flatblade in hand, the barge felt the pull backwards.

She collapsed. Backwards. Multiple junkers fell forward into her. Claws were out. Some dug into her skin through her clothes, hoisted her up by her hair in chunks. Her head was raised enough that she could meet a crouching Brillhog’s gaze. The blade was kicked from her hands.

“Stop the craft, cut that sharpoon loose.” As he dictated the order, the Diemon moved to do exactly that. And still, the various palm-sized hunks of machinery and plating waggled and twitched along the floor, which was itself hunks of machinery and plating. Watching Rey’s eyes follow a small, battered cylinder, Brillhog planted a cloven claw hand on it slowly, muffling its movement, then deadening it completely.

“And we’ll take what we want right now, if it’s all the same to you. Human’s no good dry, anyway.  _ Rap-po nigili Jakku’jaa. _ ”

Another deft twist of her head and she was being pressed into the floor, in much the same way she’d been against the speeder. The jagged “tile” pattern of crude floor plating was quite uneven—one of these sliced her cheek as she was shoved down. Between the parade of boots and exposed hooves, she saw some kind of  _ cube _ screwed in near Bee Bee’s cuff-socket.

The flesh is desirable, but no matter what you do with it you have to  _ get _ to it first.

_ Mother, Father, Brother, if this is the junker’s end… _

* * *

Again, a number of things happened in the same eyeblink.

One, the barge’s engine failed. Completely.

Two, the magniclamp—the  _ cube _ —had not been activated yet. That metal was starting to pulse, assuming the weak current of Electrical Force across the northern hemisphere of Jakku.

Third, Beebee’s cuff-socket lost power. All three of these things stem from the same place: loss of power.

In the moment of confusion as the barge hit the sand, Rey let herself be rolled. Every hand gripping her was now loose. As was… well, the whole vehicle. As she again clambered for balance, plates slipped loose beneath her hands and feet.

The Diemon was nearest her. Without a conscious thought she was crawling—on all fours—on top of the dazed porker. Remembering what weapons she would always have, she knew exactly where the important blood vessels were. Again, you learn quite a lot when you’re on your own. Among those things you learn are how strong human teeth are, and how a predator savors its prey’s flesh. Thankfully, Rey never did learn the Jakkui taste for human meat. Right now, if not for her long-accustomed state of shock, she would’ve felt a surge of sickness eating through her body.

She did feel some “taste” for the thing hanging from the Diemon’s belt. She picked up the razordisk, decided this would be as good a souvenir as any. It didn’t jump out, but it t _ hrummmm _ ed in her hands.

The three speeders still needed to be dealt with. As Rey looked around, she saw the wreckage was far more extensive than the initial crash would have anyone believe. And she heard Bee Bee’s wheepling, along with… something new. The sound guided her to her traveling companion. And someone she could actually understand.

_ “Oh, thaaaaank you for freeing us! Over heeeeere!” _

“Whoever you are, shut up or I’ll kill you too.” Scouting among the wreckage. Eventually, she found a crate rapidly working on being busted open. An urgent kick relieved it of the stress, spilling her weapons—and quite a few others’—to the orange-brown sand. She found her electrostaff and was thankful for it. Without a second thought she pulled on her belt as well, clipping the razordisk to it and lighting her electrostaff. Something magnic in it must’ve been on the fritz; she’d never traveled this close to the pole.

The closest speederbike—the largest, with the heavy grille—came back around, and she got the bright idea to charge it. She was running, staff in one hand, when it subtly altered course to scrape alongside her. But she had her agility, and saw the move coming, leaping up far enough to get her at eye-level with the speeder pilot, swinging the staff into his head. It crackled in and out several times against his face, melting some of the skin and underlying tissue. He screamed, fell to the ground unconscious, possibly dead, tail flicking at her foot limply. The speederbike continued a ways before skipping into the sand up to its windshield.

She ran to it, mounted herself on the saddle just as the long, narrow bike found her. With a couple cursory whacks it came up again, and the controls looked straightforward enough. She had the bike up and ready to slam headfirst into the other speeder within three seconds. The other chickened out first, pulling aside. Rey slammed the bike into him anyway, again throwing both like ragdolls and trashing their vehicles.

She emerged, not letting herself feel every injury she’d just sustained. Soon her body, as it had many times before, would repair stronger than before. But for now, she sustained minor injuries, save that old blaster bolt.

The rider, like her, was fazed but not down. She’d want him neutralized, but in as bad a state as possible. Both deathtraps now trashed. He could hide among the scattered wreckage, if he were stupid. Apparently, he was. He was laid out on one side, curled up like some lost, pathetic child. Right next to his speeder’s radiator. As with most mid-level vehicle tech on this world, light enough to be picked up with two hands. Flesh sizzling makes a sound just as loud, if not louder, than the flesh’s wearer, who is liable to scream until strain raws his vocal chords into muteness.

One more speeder bike, up to three other junkers to go, including Brillhog.

_ “Rey! Behind!” _ She didn’t consider the voice’s disobedience of her order, only spun counterclockwise, first slicing Brillhog with the razordisk, then launching him several feet with an electrostaff to the chest.

As he came to a stop she paced over to him, staff in hand, clipping the razordisk back to her belt. She crouched, hovering one tip of the staff over the former junker’s chest. With her left hand now, she gripped a bunch of the creature’s hair, lifting his head up and constricting his misaligned windpipe. He tried to groan, but was just letting the last of his wasted air escape. The gash across his heavy chest was already parting like a set of fat-yellow lips.

“Worthless, huh? And what does that make you?” No sense wasting precious time to savor a moment. If her hand twitched, she could always say later that the staff had gone haywire in her hands. A good jolt combined with crash trauma and asphyxiation is merciful by some junkers’ standards.

Still left the other several junkers, but there were always cowards.

“Are they gone?” She called out.

_“Every stinkin’ one. Now come pick me up, Beebee’s with me.”_ _Beebeebeep. Beebeebeep._ That confirmed it. She pulled a loose piece of fabric free from Brillhog’s upper garment, wiped her mouth and teeth with it, just wanting to get that disgusting taste out of her system for good.

She followed the voice back to its source, saw now that the gyromech was dragging the dome with a tow cable arm, and was pricking at the magniclamp with another arm. She hoped he could get it working. If not, she had no idea what this region would do to droids. Obviously, both were still functional in any way. But give it time, and what then?

“What—who is this?” The dome replied. Again, in words she could understand.

_ “CR-13, former First Order Computation. Beebee here is the less talkative one, but we’re carrying the same information. We need to get to Net Station, and we have some internal magniclamps, but nothing that’ll hold up for long. What do you know of magnic sciences?” _

“Nothing. I hope Bee Bee can fix that thing.”  _ Beeeep. _ Sparks flew. “Soon. We don’t have long.”

No reason to question her, it seemed. But the magniclamp might…

It just might be more trouble than it was worth. Every second here could be a second wasted.

“Leave it. Computation droid, how close are we to Net?”

_ “At your estimated walking speed, we could see it within ten minutes, reach it in forty-five minutes.” _

“And if we could go any faster?” She knew they couldn’t. Scratch that question. She’d started pacing. Sitting in one place, especially in the open, was how you begged for death on Jakku. “How long before the pole starts interfering with you?”

_ “Less than an hour. I suppose you could get us there. Well,  _ **_Rey_ ** _ , can you?” _ Any answer would simply not compute—not for her, not for them. She nodded.

“I can.”

She hoped she could. The human body, she knew, needed a cyclesuit for a reason. Now she was on a clock, too.

_ I knew it wouldn’t last when I found it. Just like the gang. Just like this rotten world. _

And that was that.

Rey carried Charlie. Bee Bee rolled ahead of them. Indeed, within five minutes, Rey saw the largest tower poking over the dunes. An array of lights blinked up and down the long silver obelisk, like waves of red light. She’d never traveled this far towards the “head” of the planet before, and this trip already seemed to pay off. At the very least she could die in a new, unfamiliar place.

It only seemed to grow as the junker and two droids continued to approach it.

_ “That main tower’s at least a mile high, for reference. Never could get the exact number.” _

“The number won’t matter.”  _ And we do _ , she wanted to believe. Tricky, sometimes.

They had no choice but to keep walking. The next few towers emerged, smaller than that first one but still sizable in their own right. If that Holo about Cato something-or-other was any testament, this place was easily  _ twelve-million creds in any hall _ .

_ “Trouble ahead.” Beep. _

“There’s always trouble ahead. Any problem with that?”

_ Beep beep. _

“Good.” And she left it at that. They kept moving.

Gradually, as they continued their approach, Rey began to understand just what the fear she felt was. Every passing second without incident was another second that an enemy had simply not attacked them. She hadn’t seen any fast-flapping ornithopters or speeders, no mounted soldiers in dust-caked standard issue armor or otherwise. Still…

_ I’ve got a bad feeling about this. _

But that was the Jakkui way—only bad feeling is the one that doesn’t eat you alive.

She looked up past the skyscraper to the sky it scraped, almost having to remind herself that the battle was up there, like some cosmic storm brewing. Clouds kept the exchange of fire and ships more than half in shadow.

This world  _ was _ her Cosmos; it was all she had ever known. To leave it might as well mean death…

And she realized she’d made her peace with that, too. If the one known as Rey (no last name needed) were to die right now, she would die knowing that she had finally left this place behind.

Speaking of storms…

The battle overhead  _ was _ a storm, in some sense of the word, or at least tied to the thing brewing over the Net tower. Her staff hummed. The disk and other things in her belt were ringing, making that ugly music which she had always known as the Junker’s Song.

She couldn’t help some feeling that all of this was meant to be, that her fate would be out of her control no matter what her options. She shrugged it off.  _ Just keep moving, just keep moving! _

The clouds overhead grew darker and darker. Soon atmospheric rumblings drowned out the magnic humming. Something was surging through the dark  _ komolnimba _ clouds.

They passed over a ridge, Rey taking note of how it vibrated through her feet, up her legs into her jaw.  _ It’s a ship. Maybe the biggest on the planet, implanted into the land itself. _

And that might be how it was with all major land bodies in the vicinity. All drawn to the pole. Including the station. Charlie continued to hum, although his functions appeared to be fine. He muttered in some other junker language.

“Almost there,” she informed the two droids.

Almost.

They were almost at one tower’s feet when Rey saw the black figure just over another small hill. Upon further scrutiny, she saw that the figure was  _ two _ .

Both ignited their lightsabers. She recognized one, but the other—wearing a different mask, and slightly different build—ignited a blazing red blade in the shape of the character  _ Trill. _

She had no choice but to approach them. Danger had reintroduced itself, and she couldn’t bite these opponents’ throats open. Quickly, she moved back behind the cover of the ledge, hopefully cutting off mutual visibility.

_ Beepbeepbeep: Beep beep. _

“I know. Can you drag Charlie?”  _ Beep _ . “Good. I’ll want both hands if I’m to be a distraction.” Gently as she could, she placed Charlie on the ground. He almost seemed to bounce.

_ “Hope you know what you’re doing, meatbag.” _

“Me too.”

Bee Bee pulled out a tow cable, hooked it to a jagged exposed component in his droid friend.

_ “Don’t drag too hard. I’m fragile, you know!” _ Bee Bee had some fitting reply in droidspeak.

_ “And may the Force be with you.” _ She nodded, not really understanding, nor needing to.

“You too.”

She drew her staff, ignited it, bolted over the ridge. She was sweating harder than she might’ve ever sweated before.

* * *

Serbris Ren had not questioned his instinct to return to Net Station after letting the girl fall into the thug’s hands. That had seemed like a reunion to him, just as personally meeting them all again would be a reunion, too. He’d parked his bike just outside the complex, waving his lightsaber to indicate who he was.

Overhead, there seemed to be some clouds brewing. Blasters could really upset the natural climate of this place. No matter. He would have his prey soon enough, and he would be the one to claim them.

Then Kylo Ren had shown up, just like that. The kid had taken the other speederbike and somehow known to come here, perhaps following the same Scent he had. But that was unlikely. Still, it didn’t change that the Knight was here. He even stopped his bike next to Serbris’ own.

“Why are you here?”

Through that stupid mask of his: “Followed the same instinct you did.”

Serbris didn’t really believe it. Kylo was merely the Interrogator. Voskr was the Executioner.  _ He _ was the Hunter. They had their titles for a reason.

Kylo earned his.

“Don’t forget: we serve one Master.” Serbris’ eyebrows narrowed under his mask. And Kylo’s own mask seemed to reflect that. For now, they would just have to do the same job.

Neither needed to say that that meant waiting. Wait, they did.

The storm clouds overhead only seemed to grow darker and darker. His lightsaber twitched in his hand, tugging him like some insolent child. He kept his thumb on the igniter and his finger on the trigger.

He sensed the girl first. And then followed with his eyes to see the droid dome she cradled in her arms.

(Had he Kylo’s abilities, he would’ve felt some unease in the kid himself. But alas, he felt none.)

She disappeared behind the hill again—she’d seen them. No matter. At least one droid was with them. But he couldn’t tell where the other one was until she got closer. She would have to go through them or else not get through at all.

Emerge she did. Alone. She still had her electrostaff. Serbris could Smell the blood on her. There’d been some before, but not like this. And he was sure Kylo had some different readings entirely.

They let her approach, and she did so gladly. The Sense of Feeling was not his strong point, but Serbris could tell there was Darkness in her. That, and there seemed to be some negative force keeping him from seeing into her. He wondered if Kylo could see through that, or if he too now believed theories about those who survived as junkers.

He began his approach. Kylo followed close behind. Both ignited their lightsabers. Kylo’s was, he again remarked silently, not only loud but obnoxious overall. Might as well have taken a light-club, Serbris found it so offensive.

She kept advancing slowly towards them. That was odd. He upped his pace, doing what some would call a power-walk. Kylo followed suit, stomping his boyish little stomps. The girl just kept approaching. He tried peering into her mind, finding something—anything—that he could use, but nothing. At all. She was either sealed or empty. Both ideas puzzled him.

He made a verbal attack as well:

“What are you doing, junker? Long way from your cave, don’t you think?”

No reply. So far, so good. But it didn’t change that she was a Black Hole: nothing in, nothing out.

Then all at once, it all went to Hel.

Two lightsabers met an electrostaff. Serbris shot his Third Eye over to Kylo, saw that his blade might as well have paralyzed the girl’s staff. He could also feel that Kylo was doing his trick, trying to reach into her mind as well…

And his lightsaber did not budge. Not backward, not forward. It seemed that he’d paralyzed the girl as well. Her electrostaff crackled and he could smell the blood pumping through her, heard the slightest twitch of her fingers, but no more. Now was his chance, but… even  _ he _ had the honor not to kill a docile animal.

Then again, orders are orders. His Father would want it of him.

His lightsaber came up.

_“DON’T YOU TOUCH HER!”_ _What?_ The reaction was beyond instantaneous. Kylo’s mental concentration broke, but he must’ve found what he needed. He raised his flaming crossguard like an axe over his head, ready to become the _guilotern_ and relieve Serbris Ren of his proud head.

Whatever this was, the Hunter would meet it with equal aggression. He would strike down this prepubescent failure.

Strike. Block. Parry. Slash. Kylo switched his grip to backhand, swiping up like the world’s angriest—and least competent—butcher. Serbris fired from the hilt several times, but each time the blade ate them.

The junker was helping him, too. He turned his attention to keeping the cross guard away from him, while also firing in the girl’s direction. His theory was undoubtedly correct, judging by her reflexes, but even  _ she _ couldn’t keep up. Kylo didn’t take long to catch on, turning briefly while letting his blade block Serbris as he went.

_ Now’s my chance. _ He fired at Kylo one more time. The bolt struck him in the side and he fell. Briefly, at least. Serbris attempted to get a killing slash in, but the other Ren was not a bruised animal just hoping to get away. And the junker was already on the run. He was about to turn his blaster to her when Kylo knocked the blade out of his hand. He fell.

“You’re a traitor.” Kylo held his blade there a moment longer. Then he made an excuse.

“Are we’re losing the battle up top. This does nothing.” And there were things he did not reveal, which he would bring directly to His Supremacy. Snoke. Father. He sensed the wounded pride in Serbris, and decided he liked it. He let his blade hang there, ready to plunge straight down into the Hunter’s chest, before deactivating the blade. As he’d intended, She had gotten away.

_ It can’t be her. Yet I know it is. Either way, he’ll know I acted on impulse. I’m conflicted. _

As the saying goes, “the universe is smaller than we can ever know.”

* * *

The entrance was unguarded, save one young brill in partial Terror Trooper armor. Rey had no issue with taking him out, and was already trying to work the door when he finally fell. She was panting, too. Sweat rolled off her in sheets. The blaster wound was giving her a delayed sting. She took a moment to learn against the massive building, regaining her breath. If the pain remained present, she gathered, she would live. The alternative, as always, was death.

_ What happened back there was bizarre. Didn't expect any part of that to work… It was too easy, wasn't it? Couldn't have been on purpose, it happened because one turned on the other. For me. Why? _

She couldn't find an access mechanism - anyone with dependance on a constant guard might've placed the only mechanism inside, where someone could look down on the entrance and decide who would be let in. After a moment, looking up gave her view of a long  _ oyostalk _ : the viewport from the inside. She'd need it to see her - not just that, but see her as friendly.

No matter what she would face, she knew she didn't have long. Just as well. But she'd need to get in. Would she have time to put on the guard's equipment?

_ If he's any indication, just a few bits will do. The mask, probably. _

She turned, stooped beside the body, felt around for that mask. If she remembered right, there were two pieces to it. After a moment, she pulled both out of the guard's satchel. She put the mask on first, then the helmet over it, with some injury- or magnic-related clumsiness. How anyone could function through this was a mystery to her. It hummed faintly against her skull.

Tentatively, she took a few steps back and waved to the oyostalk. It turned itself downward to examine her. With any luck it would avoid seeing the injuries or non-regulation weapons.

She didn't have luck. She had a droid who could sneak into Net Station Tower Ash and plug into the door latch mainframe.

_ Beep beep beep. _

She had to smile at that one. As she entered the facility she tossed the First Order helmet to the dust.

Inside was a bit deserted, almost spooky. The ever-constant hum she might as well have forgotten about suddenly lifted. She'd never heard her footsteps click against the floor quite like this before. The walls were colored in a strange way, not exactly intimidating but undoubtedly  _ alien _ . Several hallways converged here, in some kind of front room.

Bee Bee rolled up from somewhere on her right. Still dragging Charlie behind him. How they hadn't gotten caught, she could only amount to "a bit of blending in".

"Where's the transmitter room?"

_ "We have the schematics. Keep up if you can," _ Charlie explained. Bee Bee turned rapidly, beeping once, and headed down the center corridor. Rey had seen the occasional framed picture before, but now she saw holo stills  _ everywhere _ ! And she recognized so many from various transmissions: the destruction of Death Star I. Vader and the Master Windu. Revan's two selves.

Then doors started popping up. Most were locked. Not so much as a gonker pulled by them. She'd been in many a dead place before, too, but never one which should have been alive. A place like this, even to her, simply couldn't be operated without even this hallway being occupied to its fullest.

She brought her staff out, ignited it. This was deliberate. They might even be following a very Jakkui habit now: letting an enemy simmer before ambushing...

_ "Engdod vji dil'ii Empirosa!" _

_ "For His Supremacy!" _

And the battle resumed. Blaster fire exchanged from Everywhere to Everywhere Else. Junker's impulse kicked in and Rey was running, crouched low but still in full exposure of blaster fire. Bee Bee was still ahead of her. Green bolt crossed her vision one way, red and purple bolts another - or maybe the color said nothing of direction, which was most likely. If only she could do something crazy, get the two factions to either shut up or fall down; that would be nice.

Then she turned into one room in particular, and the civil war was left at the door, it seemed. And this room seemed to be completely unimportant. Hardly even maintenance, as there were hardly any cleaning supplies, only a drain-thing in one corner that she'd never seen before, could only guess at its function.

"Can't transmit from here," Rey commented aimlessly.

_ "No kidding. Good news is, we have ventilation." _ She glanced up without needing to really look.

"No, that won't fit me."

_ "It won't have to." _ But, in several ways, that was a lie. She would not sell them short by delivering them  _ most of the way _ , primarily.

"I go with you. Simple as that."  _ Beeeep. _ "Now, how do we get over there?"

Charlie needed a moment to deliberate on that. The light pattern on his dome looked to be blinking more slowly now than before. Bee Bee looked on at the computer in… concern? For a droid, to a junker, that seemed paradoxically complex, yet touching in some strange sense. Someone who cared for another. Either the broken pyramid on the ground didn't notice, or else didn't acknowledge that she could see.

_ "Ya see up there? That's our way through. Climb up, do a couple Arkimedians and drop near a transmission console. From there we clear the room, plug in, press 'send.'" _

Simplified in Rey's mind: Simple plan, tricky execution.

She nodded. Outside, something decently large went off, most likely a grenade. One glance up at the ceiling grating told her the fast-talking droid was right. Not even with all the technologies yet unknown to her would she trust a full-sized human in there. And in most cases, why  _ would _ a human ever be in there, outside right now.

There were people in the transmitter room. People everywhere. The droids - both of them - would need ample time, concentration and safety. Or even just one. Redundancy and all that. Someone was smart enough to know all would not go well.

She took a moment to memorize the hologram that Bee Bee showed her of their route.

"See you on the Otherside."

She opened the door and stepped out into the crossfire.

* * *

A good junker is never unprepared. Crouched behind a cracked-open door, she saw where the blast sources were - where there's a path, there's a target. She had her staff, and maybe she could try something with that razordisk. Plenty of others before resorting to limbs and teeth.

She pushed the door fully open with her back, almost twirling 'round to throw the disk. Just its sight was distracting enough for a time. Seasoned Imperial operators were less liable to jump at something like that, but the newer Terror Troopers had to hold fire for a moment - a moment is the only weapon you ever have. Rey contemplated that line as one of the troopers jumped and then was still. She could've been a traveling philosopher.

Forgetting the momentary aid, the razordisk was not at all surprising to Imperials who'd seen idiors attempt raids before. With that added distraction, they became easy pickings for a barely-adult groné with an electrostaff. She took a couple more blaster bolts, most of these just scrapes along the arms.

She bolted with what bolting strength she had left to the right door, searching for the desired marker. "Red door, marked as П." After some searching and anxious gunfire from behind, she found it, and pressed the manual lift button. Druggishly, it opened like a set of jaws. She saw two very confused-looking kids - around the same age as her - suddenly spring from their seats with blasters in hand. But both were too startled to even fire before she dispatched them in turn. In her mind's center, she was an insignificant little beetle, blown farther and farther from the nest. She wouldn't drift for much longer.

She punched the button she assumed would shut the door. It was the right one - the jaws clamped down. The door was Hevin-black on the other side.

Confrontational, almost paranoid: "You can come out now." And when the grate clattered to the floor she wanted to jump. She gasped, turned with staff in hand.

_ "OW!" _ Charlie, obviously dropped first. He bounced like a broken cymbal. A spark or five  _ fliszed _ through the air. Bee Bee was more graceful, seeing as he was constructed with a grappling hook. He eased himself to the floor and must've beeped silently to Charlie, because the severed dome had a retort at the ready.

_ "Yes, I know. Rey, could you, uh…" _ He let the junker finish the thought. She walked over to the droid, and picked him up. His light arrays were dimming. There was a sad little hum radiating off him.

_ "Aw, don't stare! Just set me down on the console nearest the holomonitor, Beebee can handle the rest from there." _

"Why you - you in particular?"

Without any moving parts, the dome clearly articulated a gallows grin.

Hitting the floor from the ceiling, even when you have no nervous system, is never not painful. Charlie could barely feel it, but it hurt all the same. What was left of his frame rattled like expired bones.

Beebee floated down next to him.

_ "Could've brought me down with you." _

_ Yes, but that wouldn't have been as fun. _

_ "Now, when did  _ **_you_ ** _ get a sense of humor?" _

_ As the Order fleshbags would say, "I learned from the best". _

The junker was showing visible signs of exhaustion. Those wounds didn't look too good.  _ He _ didn't "feel" good either.

Pain is, naturally, a way to quickly detect and identify injury, in a way that no fleshbag can ignore. Droids have that all there, but it's more like they're being told, rather than feeling much of anything. As a human, his pain would be unignorable. What would that be like, he wondered?

He caught Rey gawking at him.

_"Yes, I know. Rey, could you, uh…"_ _Get me to the console, please._

She stood over him for a moment. Then picked him up. Her lift was a little unstable. The rate of her breathing was erratic.

_ "Aw, don't stare! Just set me down on the console nearest the holomonitor, Beebee can handle the rest from there." _

From the floor:  _ So you're sure it has to be you? _

His high-frequency response:  _ You know as well as I do what this'll do. Heroism's a fleshbag concept too, isn't it? _

_ Yes. _

He was laid on the console table. Beebee cabled his way up from the floor, rolled beside him.

_ Are you just going to sit there all day, or are you plugging me up? _

The gyromech's response was to pop out his interface module. He rolled over to the main hardware panel and began pulling. Charlie saw the junker girl pull up a chair and sit down.  _ Now she's feeling it _ , he commented inwardly.  _ She might have less time than I do. _

Beebee:  _ dissecting data cables now. You won't believe the images I'm seeing here! So many things made restricted by the Order! _

_ How close are we to hooking up? _

_ Give me thr - ... Getting something from surveillance feed. We don't have that long. _

In Fleshbag:  _ "Rey, we've got trouble on the horizon!" _

She raised her head to gaze at them. He wanted to ask Beebee what her heat readings were.

The girl lumbered up out of the swivel chair and picked up her staff. She was sluggish the whole way.

Blasterfire outside.

Rey reached down to the two kids' bodies to take the pistols from their hands. She'd seen them used before, never relied on them herself. She'd have to now.

Charlie wondered if he felt some belated allegiance now. Those two were First Order conscripts, as was typically the case. Either way, they were the enemy, just as the Imperials and Order thugs fighting over this station were enemies to them all.

* * *

The new fighters turned the tide with an unprecedented speed. But, truth be told, it was one in particular. The Clone Wars Holos had told of the droid horrors: machines moving faster than any man, even any Jedi. Vultures. Tri-fighters. The monster Grievous. And it seemed, after the technological setbacks of the Imperial era, they had come again. One such 'machine' was all it took to cut through Imperials and First Order like the shooting blade of an emerald lightsaber.

It was almost too fast to see. Most couldn’t even see what kind of Wing it was - some would confirm that it was an X-Wing. One of the newer models, with the splitting wings and arrowhead nose, but the pilot was the real figure here, hidden by the space-black canopy. The silver dome of an astromech was also clearly visible, if you were fast enough to catch it. Droids already did so much for starfighters, it wouldn’t be  _ that _ big of a stretch to say that it could pilot an X-Wing on its own, right? And blast away with all five main cannons plus torpedo launchers?

First Order Eclipses, ISD-IIIs, TIE Daggers, Hexects, Clawcraft, all of them seemed to swarm in one big vortex now. The New Republic fighters did not question this, only charged straight down the monster’s neck.

ARC-215 Corkscrews, X-177 Knlgrs, T-80 and -85 X-Wings, V-Wings, B-Wings, K-Wings, all of them blasting outward in all directions like a single omnidirectional turboturret.

In the sense of battles, it was a shock. In the sense of stories to be told over the HoloNet for years to come, the image would go down in infamy. The thunderstorm of cannonfire mirrored the atmosphere pretty well.

The X-Wing led the charge. And it was the first to break the two-fleet blockade.

* * *

Two shots, and the fifteenth Terror Trooper dropped. Around a corner came two more alien stormtroopers. She put them down before they could trip over the pile of other bodies.

She panted, hung her arms against the doorway for support. Someone, she'd lost track who, had shot out the opening mechanism. Her staff was dropped carelessly at her feet; bending down to pick it up would be impossible without falling over.

She slowly twisted a glance back. Bee Bee had two long cables in his hand.

Quietly, slurred: "How's… progress?"

_ "Dandy. Give us one - " _ She fired. Four more stormtroopers were coming down the hallway like a wall of fire, blasters going off crazily. At least two bolts whistled by her torso - a third hit her in the lower leg. She dropped, trying to yell and failing. The fire never stopped, and neither did hers. With the one arm she still had feeling in, she returned the favor, taking out their legs. She didn't hear him finish any part of that.

The last of the stormtroopers took up position behind the barricade of bodies she'd made. Had the Rodian not been so delirious, she might've come up with something better. Same went for the barely-half-focused Rey, who needed six shots to get to this Imperial, and eight before she dropped. She'd exhaust the cartridge before long, if blasters still worked how she remembered them.

She tried to push herself up. She couldn't. Something about how she lay put pressure on her side wound. She tried reaching behind her back for her staff, agitating a couple other wounds. But, clamping her eyes shut and forgetting pain was bad, she managed to grab of hold of it and get it in front of her. She stuck one of the blaster pistols in her belt and used both hands to try and haul herself up. She let herself forget about the other one completely.

It took several tries, a decent amount of pain and a good portion of her lungs, but she was back to her feet. She felt for her belt, half-hoping to find that razordisk again. Unfortunately, there was only that blaster pistol.

She could hardly see down the corridor. Her lungs felt like black rocks. She doubted her own limbs still existed.

_ I've faced it many times, but I don't think I've ever been this close. I just hope the view's better in whatever comes next. Father, Mother, Brother, I leave you. _

If anything else came around that corner, she would dig a well within herself, funnel the last of her life Force - pull some extra from the air itself, even. The effort would kill her, but that part would be of no consequence.

What mattered was that the two droids - what were their names again? - would accomplish… something. Again, of no consequence.

* * *

Charlie had all the right wires still exposed. Wiring him up was not hard, especially to the deft gyromech whose specialty had been delicate equipment.

All that remained would be to throw the switch.

To kill his companion. He might even use the word 'friend'. Their protector was dying, too. Heat was leaving her body, he'd seen dripping spots of blood on and off since the Ren had attacked, clear signs of delirium and feebleness. She should've died already.

The ironic, part, he decided, was that Poe was wrong: they'd stayed together, but each would die alone.

_ Ready… friend? _

_ "Getting adventurous with our vocabulary, are we?" _

_ Reckon so. Is there… something you'd like to say, before we go through with it? _

The dome paused for a moment. Then spoke. He was warbled.

_ "Hmm. I'm… there's so much, actually. I wish I could've been a fleshbag. Do this for me: learn what you can, in whatever time you have left. Be  _ _ more _ _. Otherwise… Otherwise, just get it over with." _

Beebee could not feel shame, but that was the word which came to mind as he keyed in the new command.

He ended with 'transmit'.

A computation droid's brain is specialized: quick processing of copious data, resistance to viruses and overloads, speedy transfers and creative analyses. Within two seconds, the droid ceased to exist, its stored data dumped in its entirety to the Net transmitter. Personality and related subroutines stayed in the shell, wiped completely.

Beebee found the files that he and the deceased had shared, and routed them through the transmission tower.

Inside the facility, and outside for possibly two miles in every direction, the hum of a databurst was comparable to a mob's screams. Beebee heard it, Rey heard it, everyone fighting throughout the base heard it.

And with a databurst - a step up from the usual live feeds - the bright discharge from the tower is like a lightsaber being ignited. There were plenty outside who saw it:

Kylo and Serbris Ren saw it.

Snoke saw it, and General Hux beside him.

Phasma saw it.

Unkar Plutt, Wiles and the Teedos saw it.

The X-Wing and astromech saw it.

Thrawn saw it.

The deserting junkers saw it, along with every other Jakkui being within a thousand kilometers of Net Station.

The fleets above the planet saw it. The red discharge cast a beam through the vortex of ships, stretching out as far as light may go before hitting something it cannot pass.

But the  **real** spectacle was the data - the data which has now been sent, to every corner of the universe with a HoloNet receptor on any channel. The mission set out by two rogue First Order astronomers has finally been completed. Rey hadn't cared what it was, neither of the droids could really comprehend it, but everyone who did - and everyone who didn't - now knew what it was.

* * *

The Dagobah-green X-Wing put down landing gear outside the station. Its cockpit opened, allowing its passenger to dismount before rapidly closing again. He would've gladly bantered with the astromech at most times, but this time was not most others.

"You have the ship: patrol for stragglers." The silver-blue R2 unit wheepled understanding, then lifted off again with a distinct mechanization. Leaving the black-clad occupant to walk into the station.

If he thought the battle overhead was fierce, he hadn't seen the inside. As far as he gathered, ejected Imperials had made a plan to take it back from the inside, and they and the new tenants had been reduced to petty children with large guns. And… someone new, a third party.

He walked slowly, following the impulse to explore the outer edges of the interior before reaching its heart. He followed a semicircular corridor around the outside, taking note of the First Order sense of decoration: suffocating amounts of red and reflective black, the psychological swallowing of all who entered in infinite Darkness. He saw the bodies everywhere, most of them called out from various rooms in the complex to walk right to their deaths. It'd been savage, as he'd found war often was. And he didn't feel the presence of that Other out here…

He doubled back, following until the sensation surrounding him was dragging him by the arm, pulling him into the open doorway where he saw it had all taken place.

All the new death, if you think of it as a smell, was enough to make him gag, even choke. But at least one of them was not dead - not yet, at least.

He crouched over the girl, contemplating if he should even do this at all. He'd killed before, he'd let others die before. She was a heavy contributor to the Darkness here, yet… He could not deny her the chance. He owed this to her.

_ Luke Skywalker _ placed a black-gloved hand on the girl's forehead. The life Force of the world itself became a one-way circuit, flowing through him into the recipient.

Rey opened her eyes, blinked several times. Something about the old man's face was… like a sense of deja vu. She'd seen the wide, old eyes and grimly wise expression before.

"Now I think we're even," he told her. She had no idea what he meant. "Come with me, we don't have long before reinforcements arrive."

* * *

_ "She of silvery hair _

_ Parent of Hevin and Hel _

_ Eyes black as jailers _

_ In Her all's made well…" _


End file.
